Welcome to the second day of J.P. Morgan's, its 52nd annual, TMC Conference. My name is Bill Peterson, U.S. Cleantech Analyst, and really pleased to have, Will Heyburn with us again. He was with us here last year, and gave us a nice update, and we're looking forward to another one here. I guess, maybe just as an intro, maybe to introduce yourself, the company, and, you know, what, the company does.
Well, thanks for having us, Bill. I'm Will Heyburn, CFO of Blade Air Mobility. Before we get started, gotta make the lawyers happy and say that we might talk about some forward-looking statements today that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please check out our 10-K for more information, and would love to dive in.
Great. So, you know, the business has really kind of changed dramatically since the original sort of SPAC deck. You know, and maybe that's a bad word. We'll just move on from that. So can you give us an overview?
We don't want to change that.
of the business between, you know, the two main segments, which is passenger and medical segments, and where do they stand today?
Yeah, so Blade is really an asset-light air transportation and logistics company, and we're diversified across those two end markets, medical and passenger. In the medical business, we are the largest dedicated air transporter of human organs for transplant in the United States. It's a growing, fragmented market, and we got a lot of ways to win in that business line. We can continue to gain share. We can also continue to benefit from great intrinsic growth that we're seeing in that market. It's driven not only by some positive regulatory changes that allow our customers, which are transplant centers, to fly farther to pick up organs, but also some really exciting new technology that's opening the aperture in terms of what kind of organs are suitable for transplant.
On top of that, we've got a bunch of new ancillary revenue opportunities that we're still in the early innings. We're growing more on the ground. That was a 70% grower for us this quarter in the medical business, and we've also added a new service line for organ offer management, where we're taking some of the load off of our customers and help them actually do the work on clinical matching. On top of all of this, what we've really been building is a great time-critical logistics platform, and so there's a lot of other use cases, both within the medical vertical, but also in industrial as well. And in the long-term plan, we expect to grow that business dramatically across all those lines.
And then in the passenger business, I like to say that we've created the best risk-adjusted return in air mobility. What we're doing is we're staying laser-focused on what we think are the three best markets in the world for vertical passenger transportation. We're focused on routes like Manhattan to JFK, Manhattan to the Hamptons, Nice to Saint-Tropez, places where we're already making money on a flight profit margin basis, and places that are in the pole position to be enhanced and expanded through the introduction of electric air transportation. You'll hear the industry call that eVTOL, EVA. What you need to know is that these are much quieter aircraft, that over time, we believe will be much less expensive, expanding that addressable market. But in the meantime, we're growing our installed base of customers.
We're getting dedicated, exclusive infrastructure that's preparing the ground for that future electrification, and we continue to make our customers happy with a business that makes money on a flight profit basis today, and we expect to make money on an adjusted segment EBITDA basis within the next year. So we really think we're set up for success across these two business lines, and happy to dive in.
Yeah. Now, let's double-click on a few of those things. So I guess, what, where do you see... I mean, medical business has actually now become the largest segment. So where do you see the additional organic growth opportunities coming from? And I guess related to that, you mentioned that your growth should outpace that of the underlying market growth for several years. Like, what, what enables that dynamic?
So first, it's an extremely fragmented market. When we got into this business, vast majority of the customers out there were working with a local mom-and-pop operator of a couple of airplanes that used to always be right for the mission. But now the onus on matching organs had shifted away a little bit from focusing primarily on the geographic proximity, and now we're making better matches to donors that are potentially farther away. So that's a good dynamic for our business because our unit is not really an organ, it's really a block hour of flight time. So when you think about growth in organs, that last quarter was high single digits, and it's been in the teens in recent quarters. That translates to something larger than that for Blade because those organs are coming from farther away.
On top of that, it's all the ancillary opportunities that, that we've been talking about to help our customers on the ground, where maybe we were doing that pass-through, or we were helping them coordinate the ground without doing it ourselves. We can provide a better service, lower cost, more integrated if we do it for them, and it's early innings. We've got about 30 vehicles spread across 10 hubs right now, but there's a big opportunity to expand that because we have so much scale across the country. And, you know, finally, in progress, talk a little bit more about the organ matching process.
Today, when an organ procurement organization, they're the ones in the organ transplant ecosystem that's responsible for working with the donor, when they identify a donor that's a match for a potential recipient at one of our customers' transplant centers, they create what's called an organ offer. For a lot of our customers, that's waking a surgeon up in the middle of the night, multiple times every night. It's not the most efficient way to do things, and if you want to hire someone full-time, you may not have enough volume of organ offers coming in for that to make sense economically. So Blade is able to take some of that clinical work off the backs of our customers. We can free up the surgeons, let them get a good night of sleep, but also
allow transplant centers to leverage those costs across multiple centers, and make everything run a lot more smoothly that way, too. So we've just signed our first couple of customers in that business. It's a long sales cycle, 3-6 months, so it will take a little while before you start really seeing the new customer benefit from that business line. And what we said is that this year, we just expect it to start covering its costs by the end of the year. So a lot more to come as you look out more in the one-year ahead timeframe for that new business line.
Yep. I guess with that in mind, how should investors think about the competitive landscape within the organ transplant business? You talked about it being fragmented. Where's your share? Where can it go, and how does the competitive landscape look like?
For just the core heart, liver, lung air transportation, we think we're kind of in the high 20% market share today. Like I said, it's a pretty fragmented market, and the biggest advantage we have, besides what I think is the best customer service in the industry, is the scale. 'Cause in aviation, the more hours you can put on airframes, the less expensive it's gonna be, and so that's why you see us strategically in markets with really high density, buying some airframes so we can further leverage those fixed costs. So we tend to be able to leverage that scale to promise hospitals better availability with less repositioning, so it costs them less money, and a lower price per hour.
That's something they care about, but the thing they care about the most is that you're gonna have an airplane for them when they call. And so that's why it's so important that we're really an aviation-first company, and the supply side is the thing that we focus on to make sure we deliver that great service to our customers. So what we found is that maybe a hospital's been working with a small operator of some light jets for a long time, and then the first time they decide to use some of this exciting new technology for organ preservation, it might not fit through the door of the airplane. So now they have to call someone else-
and they realize, you call Blade, it's one phone call and everything, ground logistics, if there's a helicopter transfer, aircraft, we're constantly monitoring duty time. We make it so much easier, and then they get the bill, and it's even less expensive. So that actually ends up being our entry point a lot of the time, the first time a customer needs to complete a mission that maybe their legacy provider isn't set up for.
Yep. Well, it's a good segue to margins and flight margins on this, on this. So I think about a year ago, the steady-state margins were expected to be in the 15%-20% range. Last quarter, you did 22%. Is there a new target, you know, for margins? And I guess how should we... First of all, what were the drivers that get you there, and how should we think about expansion opportunities moving forward?
So it's really on the supply side that we've been able to drive the margin enhancement in this business. You know, when you think about the price per hour that we charge our customers, we have some escalators that are built into the contracts, and that's about what we see our average revenue per hour increasing. Really, where we see the margin expansion is by bringing in more conveniently located supply for our customers at lower cost and by flying those aircraft more. That's what's driving the margin expansion. That's what drove us to increase that target for the overall flight margins for this segment to get to 25% by the end of this year, which we feel we're well on track to achieve.
Mm-hmm. Do you see that being a common upper bound, or do you see that even opportunities to go beyond that, and what would drive it even higher?
There's certainly opportunities to go beyond that. That's kind of what we see in the short term this year. We talked about how all those ancillary revenue opportunities are margin accretive. So when we're using an owned vehicle to make that ground connection, that's in the 30% in terms of the flight margin contribution. Same is true for our organ matching service at scale. So there's a lot of ways that we can get that margin up, and we also talked about in markets where we're using those owned aircraft, that is a 5- to 10-point margin expansion on a free cash flow margin basis using those aircraft when we have the density to put a lot of hours on them.
There's a multitude of factors. We're attacking all of them equally, that hopefully can get us beyond that target once we get past the near term.
Maybe, maybe speaking of that aircraft announcement, I mean, historically, the team had always really touted its sort of capital-light approach, and it's still capital light with 8, but I guess you quantify the free cash flow benefits, but how should we think about your, I'd say, desire to potentially expand beyond this, you know, initial tranche?
What we don't want to be doing is making uneconomic decisions on the supply side. So we love the flexibility of the asset-light business. We're gonna remain an asset-light business, but there are places where we're just leaving money on the table from a free cash flow perspective. 'Cause if you think about the difference between a capacity purchase agreement, which is how we do most of the flying, where we don't own an aircraft, we're saying we're gonna fly X number of hours in a year, and then once we achieve that target, our price typically goes down. So there's one break point in terms of the fixed cost leverage.
In a market where we're flying a lot with overlapping customer contracts from multiple hospitals, by switching to an owned aircraft, now the cost of pilots is fixed, the cost of insurance is fixed, the cost of hangar is fixed, and your, your incremental hour, every single incremental hour, costs you less.
So there's really a huge advantage in certain of those geographies, but we love to have the flexibility to get a smaller plane when we need one, a larger plane when that's appropriate, a rotorcraft when you're flying around the Northeast. So we're always gonna be committed to that asset-light model, but given our growth, I think of it a little bit about like the base load of the power grid. You know, the owned aircraft are our nuclear power. We want it running all the time.
It's base load. It's important to have it, but the flex capacity is really important too, and it's always gonna remain a part of our strategy.
You know, this, as this is a tech conference, I'm hoping you can kinda share a little bit more about, you know, your Blade's technology stack in the medical vertical. How that enables, you know, coordination for the organ transplant missions, or maybe even how it may even have synergies with your existing core passenger business.
Yeah, so we built it all in-house, both for the passenger business and for the medical business. And the medical business, we took what used to be 50 phone calls and different text messages, and we just simplified everything into a dashboard link that we can send to our customers, and they can track the chain of custody of the organ the whole way through. They can see where it is on the ground, they can see when it's on the aircraft and the estimated time of arrival. We're, of course, coordinating to make sure all those ground elements are there waiting on the tarmac for the aircraft to arrive.
But we really make it a lot simpler for them and, and take some of the guesswork out of it, 'cause remember, our customers are coordinating a surgery that's gonna happen immediately when we deliver this organ. So communication is really critical on both sides, and, and we've created a way for that two-way communication to happen a lot more efficiently.
Yeah. I guess, is there, I guess, is there any other, you know, technology needs? Is there any, you know, further route planning tools or, I guess, anything else to match the aircraft and the vehicle in the right for the right mission, or is it pretty much baked in now?
Well, you know, the most exciting technology is not technology that we're developing, but that other companies in the industry are developing. This is perfusion technology, and other organ preservation technology. This is allowing you to essentially keep fluid flowing through the organs while they're in flight, to enable you to fly a little bit longer. And there's also some exciting new technology that allows you to revitalize an organ after it's arrived at the receiving hospital, or even before it's left the donor hospital. So there's a bunch of new technology platforms that are out there. Our customers are using many of them, and it's both increased the number of organs that become available, which you can see in the data, but it's also allowed you to go for that organ that's a bit farther away.
So it goes back to your earlier question of why, why would Blade's revenue grow more than the number of organs? You know, that's why. You're able to go farther than you've ever been able to go for organs. And, you know, you are having centers become more aggressive about attempting to pick up an organ, because now it could be possible. So we're seeing centers take a shot at a more marginal organ. It might be rejected, but Blade can arrange for a standby crew and aircraft so that you're not gonna sink $30,000 or $40,000 into the attempt. You pay a single-digit thousand-dollar fee for standby. Hopefully, the organ's accepted, then it's a full freight trip, but if it's not, you soften the blow for that transplant center.
That's really the kind of flying that Blade was built on and that we're familiar from our passenger business.
So putting the two together, remember, it's the exact same aircraft that we would use for the medical business and the passenger business. And so we're really uniquely well-equipped to offer that kind of dynamic service on the air transportation side.
Coming back to that point about perfusion, we, you know, we've been getting questions on that. I think I was surprised to hear it's actually relatively small now as a percentage of flights, but I guess, how has this expanded the market opportunity? Where does it stand today, and where do you see these perfusion technologies, you know, going from here?
Yeah, we see a teens% of our trips using some kind of perfusion technology. Now, that could be something as simple as NRP, normothermic regional perfusion. That's equipment that lots of hospitals already have. You use that in a cardiac death situation, where you actually perfuse the organ inside the donor's body after they've deceased, and then you take it out, and you ship it just like you would any cold transport. And then there's great new technologies from a number of different companies that allow you to perfuse that organ or preserve it in a very cold environment while in flight. So really, what we've seen is that being the primary driver as to why there are more organs available for transplant in America.
And then you couple that with a regulatory posture that's much more aggressive in terms of telling you, "Go after that organ, even if it's already been rejected by three folks. Find another home for that organ if it gets to its destination, but unfortunately, the recipient is no longer healthy enough to undergo surgery that day." So we're, we're seeing a lot of positive dynamics, and for good reason. You know, there's 100,000 people on the transplant list, and only about 40,000 transplants, 40,000-50,000, happen every year. So, so I think all these things are coming together, and companies working together to create a larger pool of organs that become available.
I'm gonna pause and see if there's any questions before moving to passenger. Feel free. Okay. So really, we got to know you as a company with your passenger business. And, you know, you actually turned profitable for the first time last year during a seasonally strong quarter. Can you speak to the kind of passenger volumes and utilization trends that Blade needs to see for the passenger business to be consistently profitable?
Look, we love the trends that we're seeing, particularly in the businesses that we've been investing in. Our airport transfer service in Manhattan is the best example of that. For almost 2 years, it was contributing losses on the flight profit line, and that's because in that business, we need to have a schedule available for the entire day for that to be a reliable service for the customer. But you need to have an average of 2-2.5 people on each flight before it starts to make money. 3 quarters ago was the first quarter where we were above that threshold for the first time, and now we've been there consistently.
Particularly, I'm happy that we've consistently now, three quarters in a row, generated that positive flight profit, even in a seasonally weak quarter, both for commercial air transportation in Q1, and also for Blade's passenger business more broadly. So, I think we've started to turn the corner on some of the areas that were requiring incremental investment, and then you're seeing us rationalize the overall SG&A, both in that passenger segment and also in our unallocated corporate expenses, which you saw fall almost 20% this quarter, year-over-year.
Yep. I think, you know, those who travel in New York obviously will know your airport business, but I guess, can you help size the maybe the broader New York opportunity between airport and Hamptons, which I think, at least in the past, was one of the key drivers, especially as it was the time of COVID?
Sure. So, I mean, if you think about the way our business on the passenger side is constructed today, you know, it's roughly a $100 million business. About a quarter of that is our jet charter business, about a quarter is Europe, about 10% is Canada, and then the rest is that New York business, the vast majority of which is a combination of flights to the Hamptons and some corporate charter. But we do have a significant, maybe a quarter, of that New York business is the airport transfer business that we're talking about today. However, that airport transfer business is where we see the most massive addressable market and the largest growth.
If you think about the number of people that need to go between Manhattan and the three commercial airports every year, it's about 27 million people that are making that trip, 27 million trips, if you will. We're a small fraction of that, you know, in the tens of thousands in terms of our run rate of the number of passengers that are using our service. Now, it's growing very quickly, but we see a huge opportunity ahead, and when we're starting the price at $195, it's very easy to find an Uber Black that costs more than that.
So combination of some discovery, just organically, word of mouth. We do invest some marketing dollars behind that, but also some of the areas where this is a direct hit from a consumer value prop, Hudson Yards area in particular, I'd highlight. They're opening new office space, seems like every month now, and so more and more folks that are based there within a 7-minute walk to the heliport, you know, you leave your desk, and you're at the airport 15 minutes later. It's really a value proposition that you can't match anywhere else, so I'm very excited about the growth potential there.
Can I maybe just talking, going one step further, so on so the airport driving the growth, at least within the U.S., or at least New York, how to think about the non-New York airport business from a growth perspective?
Non-New York, it's really just the connection between Nice and Monaco.
That historically has been a massive business. Now, right prior to COVID, they discontinued that scheduled service before we made our acquisition of that business. We've recently relaunched it. We're seeing great growth. Not gonna talk about specific numbers in terms of passenger counts there, but I think you need to find those slam dunk use cases, and Nice, Monaco is one of them, particularly as we're looking into the Grand Prix weekend that's coming up. That's also a market where we can create a much more seamless experience for the customer. We recently opened an on-tarmac security screening checkpoint, so when you land from Monaco at Nice Airport, get out of the helicopter, private security screening, and then you're driven directly to your gate.
You don't have to go through that broader, large commercial screening setup, so it just makes the whole process a lot easier. So very excited about that, and we're already finding great partners to work with. Announced a codeshare agreement with Emirates just about a week ago that'll allow people to book directly into Monaco, connecting in Nice after they land on an Emirates flight. So lots of good, positive dynamics on the demand generation side in that market.
You've mentioned about the, you know, margin expansion, and, you know, in the past, you invested in new airport routes, and at first, they weren't profitable, and they reached profitability. But where do you see opportunities from here to drive margin expansion in the passenger business? Maybe first starting with New York and then, you know, talking about the other regions that you're operating in.
What you're gonna see from us in the passenger business is staying focused on what's working and making that more profitable. Go back to how we see the passenger business, the best risk-adjusted return in air mobility. We wanna turn that into a profitable business, that segment, within the next year. We believe that we can do that. We wanna continue to grow markets like New York Airport and Nice, Monaco, that are growing today, continue to increase that utilization, which will allow us to massively expand the flight margin profile. You know, remember, once you're at that average 2.5 seats full, in the example of New York Airport, the incremental seat that you sell, 100% of that is dropping down to the bottom line.
So we're really in an exciting moment for that business, but it's not an area where we're focused on allocating additional capital. We're gonna be allocating additional capital to the medical business. That's where we think we can get a great return, both on our effort and our investment, through the new verticals that we've talked about and by diversifying to other time-critical cargo.
I guess, I guess maybe sticking on that last point, so I guess, how much are you investing in customer acquisition for passenger today? It sounds like it's mainly in New York and Nice and Monaco.
It's in the low single-digit $ millions, and it's been coming down as we've spent more efficiently.
So with all this sort of said, like, how much more organic growth potential do you see? How should we think about growth, primarily, I guess, New York Airport and, and Nice, Monaco, I guess over the next few years?
I think over time, they can both be multiples of what they are today because the market penetration is just so shallow where we sit today, and the value prop is there. You just need Google Maps to realize that this makes a lot of sense. You know you can open that. You can open the Uber app. You can realize the price is right, and you're saving a lot of time. So I, I'm very bullish on our ability to continue growing that business.
Yep. Another aspect of the New York bit, well, especially airport, maybe as well as Hamptons, is your ability to drive pricing. So, how should we assume the price trends, you know, should be from here? You're well above your sort of list, sort of $195 or even $95 for the people that have the passes. How should we think about those type of trends?
Yeah, look, we've seen the average price in recent months be closer to the $330 range, but what I'm excited about is that's happening because our customers are choosing to pay more for additional flexibility. If you are on a budget and you're not worried about us selling out, there are great deals to be had, and you can beat that Uber Black pricing. But we're finding that 30-ish% of our customers would like to pay a little bit more in order to have increased flexibility. A huge percentage, around 20% of our customers, ask us to go ahead and stage vehicles for them upon their arrival in New York, so they don't have to worry about figuring out how to get a car to show up at the exact right time.
We make a fixed dollar margin on all those trips, so, you know, consistently profitable for us. Things like that are a win-win for us. It's something our customer's gonna be paying for anyway, and we find a way to make it a more seamless experience for them.
Yeah. And, you know, this, try to keep this high level and bigger picture, but I guess, what kind of demand trends are you seeing with your passenger businesses, where, you know, a good chunk of the way through the second quarter?
You know, I think on the jet charter side, it's somewhat of a market-driven business, so we've seen a little bit softer pricing in jet charter, probably a little bit lighter demand versus what we saw in the same period last year. That's not a high-margin business, so it really doesn't move the needle on the overall profitability. But otherwise, we're happy with what we're seeing in terms of continued profitability in the airport product. And you know, unfortunately, April is a pretty light month for all of our passenger businesses.
Yeah.
We're not quite in the summer, and we're done with that winter season, that's important to Europe, so hard to draw too many conclusions from what you see in the month of April for passenger.
Mm-hmm. Makes sense. So I want to pivot, you know, to the, I guess, the next-gen technology of EVA or eVTOL or flying car, or whatever you'd like to call it. But first of all, what is your expectations around the timing for you, at least the partners you've identified, and how do you think about the expectations around a cohabitation phase during the early stages of adoption?
You know, we're not in control of that, and neither are the folks that are building these aircraft. You know, it's really a regulatory challenge that it's hard for me to look in a crystal ball and know when these things are gonna happen. But what I will say is that if there's a place where they're gonna make economic sense, it's gonna make economic sense in our markets first. That's what we're focused on, areas that already have the requisite infrastructure, where Blade has exclusive terminals in those infrastructure locations, and where Blade has already built up the requisite scale, both in terms of number of passengers per aircraft, but also translating that into the right number of hours per aircraft so that an operator is incentivized to fly for us.
These are non-trivial tasks that have taken us years, tomorrow is the 10-year anniversary of the company, to be able to get to a place where our flight profit margins make sense. So we think it's really important to focus on those slam dunk markets first, where the consumer demand is already there. And to your question on cohabitation phase, the new machines may not be perfect for every day, every distance, every set of weather conditions. Could have some range limitations, could have some payload limitations, may not be instrument flight capable on day one. So by being committed to this hybrid fleet, hybrid fleet opportunity, where we're still gonna have aircraft, we're still gonna have seaplanes, rotorcraft, eVTOL, that means if you have a bad weather day, you can transition folks to a seaplane, still fly instrument flight rules, and get them where they need to go.
Remember, our mindset is around the customer experience, making sure the customer gets the product that they paid for. Most customers want to make it out to the party on time. They want to make their flight.
They're less focused on, is it an electric aircraft? They want to get there. And so I think we uniquely, in this cohabitation phase, are gonna be able to more reliably ensure that that happens for our customers, which I believe gets us a great competitive advantage, particularly when you pair it with our proprietary technology that we've built by flying people over 10 years. You know, if you tried to design it on a whiteboard, you probably wouldn't build it exactly the way we built it. That's 'cause you never would've flown anybody.
So it's real learned experience that's led to the technology stack that we've built, and we've got folks that keep coming back.
Yeah. I think and we had a couple other presenters earlier, and I think there's a view that the cities are gonna be likely to take existing heliports and electrify them. You have your own sort of, you know, West 30th and 34th locations. I kind of sense there's gonna be a tension on, on, you know, public good versus proprietary, so how do you see that playing out? You know, I think they talked about, like, a downtown location, which I don't think is owned by anybody. So how do you think that plays out over time?
You know, these are already public use heliports. So, you know, when you buy your own helicopter, you can go land at one of these heliports, and you can unload into your Maybach or whatever is waiting, I don't know if you're a Maybach or a Bentley guy, Bill. But you can have your car waiting for you, and you go on your merry way. Where it starts to get difficult is if you have six people showing up in six different Ubers, and you have six people arriving that need to get into six different Ubers. You need to check all their IDs, you need to weigh all their bags. That's where a terminal becomes important.
So I think the leases that we have in these locations, the business that we bring to those locations, gives us a good competitive advantage to continue on and be able to service the throughput that you're gonna need to service. Though, you could land at one of these locations if you wanted to, and we've heard proposals of folks that might try to screen passengers in a remote location across the street. You know, you could see folks trying to do it different ways, but I do think we'll be doing it the most seamless way on day one. And I think it's gonna be difficult to create new infrastructure quickly, even if everybody wants it.
You know, we're right in Hudson Yards, our office in New York, and it's taken almost 10 years to build a new park called Little Island. You know, that was a park on a pier that already existed. You know, so you just look at some of the traps that folks have to run to do even something non-controversial in a city. You know, the infrastructure we have is probably gonna be the infrastructure we have for the time being, which I think tips the hat to our advantage.
Yeah. Makes sense. Kinda moving to financials, so to kinda sum up some of the prior discussion on margin expansion in both your existing businesses, this should support an inflection of positive EBITDA this year, you know, coupled with the top line growth. I guess, you know, could you speak to where the company continues to invest in the business and room for, I guess, further areas of efficiencies and cost downs?
So we've got approximately $150 million in cash and short-term securities on the balance sheet, and where we want to invest that is the medical business. We see a huge opportunity through inorganic acquisition opportunities, through the purchase of additional vehicles, through limited purchase of aircraft in select markets. Again, we're not gonna become an asset-heavy company, but we do see a place for aircraft ownership within the asset-light model with great returns. So that's really what that capital is earmarked for in the future. And the platform that we've built, aircraft dedicated 100% to Blade, spread all across the country, along with vehicles spread all across the country, with 24/7 availability, it's extremely unique, and it's highly utilized, meaning that flying that incremental hour or driving that incremental hour doesn't have to cost us very much.
So we are focused on life sciences today, and then we do have a huge addressable market ahead of us. We're gonna stay focused on that. But there's a lot more that we can be doing, whether that's moving blood and tissue samples for our existing customers, whether that's moving parts for aircraft that are stranded on the ground, whether that's moving microchips that have to get to the Ford plant, otherwise, it's gonna shut down at millions of dollars of cost per day. These are all examples of aircraft we see moving around in the market today that aren't ours, but should be-
... because we believe that we'll have a lower cost to dispatch that kinda service. So that's the longer-term plan. You know, the things that are in progress, very much so today, are expanding the ground business, adding new ancillary opportunities within that existing life sciences vertical, but we have grander aspirations for that business.
Yeah. Unlike, I guess, other peers in the business, which are, you know, obviously spending a lot of money well in advance of any sort of revenues or burning a lot of cash, you have a path to be free cash flow positive, certainly much sooner. In conjunction with that, you actually have started a buyback program. So how should we think about- How should investors think about, you know, your willingness to use that, that buyback program that you recently authorized?
Look, we found it's an important tool to have in our toolbox at the ready. Our number one priority is deploying capital with great returns to grow our business or to diversify our business. So those are the opportunities that are first on the list, but we're glad we have it in place. We think there are situations that could arise that always have to put it in the context of other investment opportunities where it could make sense, but the number one priority is continuing to invest in the business because we see a lot of opportunity for that out ahead of us.
Makes sense. Well, we are approaching the end of the talk, but, Will, thanks for supporting the conference, this year and sharing your insights again and the progress thus far.
Thanks for having me, Bill.
Yep, thanks.