Good morning, and welcome to United Airlines Holdings Earnings Conference Call for Q4 and full year 2021. My name is Brandon, and I'll be your conference facilitator today. Following the initial remarks from management, we will open the lines for questions. At that time, if you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. This call is being recorded and is copyrighted. Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed or rebroadcast without the company's permission. Your participation implies your consent to our recording of this call. If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line. I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Kristina Munoz, Director of Investor Relations. Kristina Munoz, you may begin.
Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's Q4 and full year 2021 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, which is available on our website at ir.united.com. Information in yesterday's release and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance. All forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to the company. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our earnings release, Form 10-K and 10-Q and other reports filed with the SEC by United Airlines Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors. Also, during the course of our call, we will discuss several non-GAAP financial measures.
For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our release. Joining us on the call today to discuss our results and outlook are Chief Executive Officer, Scott Kirby, President, Brett Hart, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Nocella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Gerry Laderman. In addition, we have other members of the executive team on the line available to assist with Q&A. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Scott.
Thank you, Kristina, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Before I get into the details of our Q4 and how we're thinking about the year ahead, I wanted to share some brief observations about the recent developments regarding the rollout of 5G. Mostly, I wanna thank the White House, Secretary Buttigieg, and the CEOs of AT&T and Verizon for finding and agreeing to an approach that mostly avoided what would have been severe disruption to passenger and cargo operations in this country. This wasn't an issue created by the airlines. Every carrier follows the rules dictated by the FAA. Since we first heard from the FAA about this issue in November, United has been 100% engaged to underscore the severe risk that the 5G rollout posed to aviation, but more importantly, to bring people together and drive consensus around common sense solutions.
While we don't have a final resolution quite yet, I'm confident we'll get there. This problem has been resolved collaboratively, allowing a fulsome rollout of 5G without significant impact to aviation in 40 countries around the world, and we can do the same thing here in the United States. While I wish it had happened earlier, the good news is we now have everyone engaged, the FAA and DOT at the highest levels, the equipment and aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and the telecoms. I'm confident we'll soon have a clear set of objective criteria that allow a full rollout of 5G without significant impact to aviation.
I'll close this part of my comments by once again thanking the administration and Secretary Buttigieg, but also a particular thank you to the CEOs of AT&T and Verizon for voluntarily agreeing to these near-term restrictions near major airports. With that, I'll turn to discussing our results and outlook. Over the last year, the United team persevered through the impact of COVID, but also made incredible progress laying the foundation for the future. Omicron is once again impacting the near term, but as we've done since March 2020, we're taking action on capacity, and we remain confident in the long-term projections in spite of the near-term headwinds from Omicron. Before we discuss our results and outlook, I wanna take a minute to thank and brag about all that the people of United accomplished in 2021.
In spite of the historic challenges, United came together as a team to get through the worst crisis in the history of aviation and set ourselves up to be the world's leading airline on the other side. We saw our NPS improve by 30 points versus 2019 and introduced United Next to grow the airline and improve the product for customers. We also made unique, real, and structural changes to our process and technology, which we believe is going to lead to best-in-class CASM-ex performance once we have the full fleet return to service. I think perhaps one of the least understood industry changes is that United is expecting to exit 2022 at a CASM-ex run rate below 2019, an expectation that sounds very different than most others in the industry. It is a transformational competitive change.
while we can't control the exact timing or course of COVID, we can improve the customer experience and control our costs, and that puts us in a completely different competitive position to outperform in the future. In the short term, however, we're remaining responsive to the risk posed by the Omicron variant. Omicron is impacting demand in the near term, but the biggest impact of Omicron-fueled surge in COVID cases we've seen so far was on our people, and it led to a significant disruption in our operational performance over the holidays. As tough as this period has been, I'm particularly grateful that because of our vaccine requirement, we are no longer losing vaccinated employees to COVID, and we still don't have any vaccinated employees hospitalized. Our vaccine requirement has truly saved lives.
As we look to the remainder of 2022, Omicron is impacting near-term demand, and we're reducing our capacity as a result.
Bookings continue to be strong for March and beyond, and our base case remains a continued recovery in demand, including international and business. Gerry and Andrew will give you more specifics on what we're changing this year on capacity. The important point is we remain confident on the long-term CASM-ex targets and future of United. We believe, and certainly hope that as a company and society, we are moving into the endemic stage of COVID. We'll continue to manage as we have throughout the crisis, and once again this quarter, and be responsive to what actually happens instead of what we hope will happen. I'll close by once again thanking the United team. They've done amazing things since the crisis began, and they've laid the foundation for United to be the world's leading airline going forward. Now I'll hand it over to Brett.
Thanks, Scott. I'd like to start by thanking our employees for their hard work in the quarter. In the busiest travel season since the start of the pandemic, our team dealt with disruptions from weather events, changing international travel requirements, and most recently, the impact from the Omicron variant. With Omicron impacting both our employees and the rest of the country over the holidays, our team pulled together to serve our customers, and we are grateful to them. As Scott mentioned, this latest variant has caused a delay in the expected recovery and is having an impact on bookings in Q1 . However, we remain confident that travel will rebound quickly as cases subside. We expect a strong summer and H2 of 2022, consistent with our expectations pre-Omicron.
While Andrew will outline the changes we've made in the near term on capacity in just a moment, we are confident and committed to our 2023 and 2026 financial targets. With our United Next network plans in mind, we look forward to hiring the next generation of United pilots. Next week, we'll host a grand opening of our United Aviate Academy in Goodyear, Arizona. We're excited about the role our world-class pilot training facility will play in recruiting and preparing the next generation of United pilots. In fact, we welcomed the inaugural class in December, which consists of 30 students, 80% of whom are women or people of color. In the near term, we are making sure we are fully staffed as this is critical to executing our plan as the recovery takes hold. As difficult as the holidays were, we are returning to a normalized operation.
We have taken additional steps to ensure that disruptions are minimized for our customers through capacity management and incentives. Regarding the current labor environment, while we have small pockets of hiring challenges, those do not currently impact our ability to operate the mainline and are not impacting our capacity planning for 2022. We feel confident in our ability to achieve the level of hiring at United that supports the growth we are planning in H2 of 2022 and beyond. Despite Omicron's recent impact, we've achieved the highest ever Net Promoter Score in our history, which is undoubtedly due to the team's service improvements and technological advancements that make flying with us easier than ever. A couple of examples.
This year, more than 760,000 customers have benefited from connection savings, and the percentage of customers that have misconnected in 2021 is the lowest since the merger. Our clubs in the U.S. are back, and we're ready for international travel to return as well, as this includes six Polaris lounges. We've made it easier than ever to order on board with our PayPal QR code. Also, our expanded beer, wine, and snack offering is now available on nearly all flights over two hours. Gerry will provide greater detail on our 2022 costs, but our 2022 budget incorporates the elevated inflationary pressures seen by the rest of the country and fully reflects the labor expense we expect to incur in the year.
Importantly, the changes in our fleet and mix of flying are what give us the confidence that we will reach CASM-ex below 2019 by Q4 of this year, putting us on track to achieve our long-term cost goals in the United Next plans. While the macro environment delayed the recovery, we continued to act on additional initiatives towards our goal to become 100% green by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. United is now the largest airline to invest in zero-emission hydrogen electric engines for regional aircraft through a new equity stake in ZeroAvia, a leading company focused on hydrogen electric aviation solutions. We also announced the second round of corporate participants in our Eco-Skies Alliance program. We believe each of these initiatives, among others, further solidifies United's position as the industry leader in sustainability.
With 2021 behind us, we're responding to the near-term volatility with areas of the business we can control while continuing to invest in our people and product as we plan for our United Next plan that will transform the airline in the coming years. With that, I will now turn it over to Andrew to discuss the revenue environment.
Thanks, Brett. Total revenue for Q4 finished at the high end of our range and down 25% on 23% less capacity versus Q4 of 2019. TRASM in the quarter finished down 2.5% versus the same period. We're pleased to reach the high end of our Q4 revenue guidance, but the Omicron variant did have around a two-point negative impact on TRASM results and has delayed the anticipated demand in revenue recovery by a few months. Prior to Omicron, we were on track to deliver close to flat unit revenues in Q4 of 2019 versus Q1 of 2019.
Just as in recent quarters, our cargo operation again delivered a record quarter for United. Total cargo revenue for the quarter was up 130% from the fourth quarter of 2019 and finished the full year at $2.3 billion. Q4 loyalty revenue and other revenue was up 3% versus Q4 of 2019 to $518 million. Now turning to our Q1 outlook. Leisure bookings and demand for late February and March are largely on track with our expectations. However, Omicron disrupted close-in leisure demand in January across most regions and cancellations did increase. Bookings and cancellations are now starting to return to normal. Business demand fell sharply in January versus early December.
Given business demand tends to book closer to the travel, we remain optimistic that we'll see a strong rebound as we progress through the quarter, although that's clearly linked to the virus. Our revenue projections assume business demand rebounds by the end of February to where we were in early December are down approximately 40% versus the same period in 2019. Leisure demand trends that we've observed tra vel later in Q1 of 2022 have allowed us to manage our yield quality successfully versus our experience with the Delta variant surge. As a result, we remain optimistic that Omicron's impact, while significant, will be focused on January and February at this point.
While we can't say if there will be additional widespread variants in the future, what we can say is that our expectation is that Omicron and each possible future variant will have a smaller and smaller impact on our revenue over time as compared to the impact from the Delta variant. We now expect total revenue in Q1 of 2022 to be down 20%-25% versus 1Q 2019, with capacity down 16%-18%. We have moderated our capacity plans in Q1, reflecting the anticipated lower demand in the near term as a result of Omicron. Lower capacity in Q1, along with a more conservative outlook, results in our latest full year 2022 plan having lower capacity than 2019. This is down from the 5% growth versus 2019 we expected back in October.
We've moderated our 2022 capacity by lowering aircraft utilization and delaying the return to service of certain planes. Our grounded Pratt & Whitney 777 jets are now expected to fly again starting in March, and then gradually reenter service, fully by November. We've also delayed the return of service of certain narrow-body jets into H2 of 2022 and lowered the planned utilization levels of our regional jets for the remainder of the year, addressing pilot shortages. Due to these changes, typical mainline aircraft utilization is expected to be well below normal until Q4 of 2022. The phasing in of this idle capacity, particularly from larger jets and with lower utilization of RJs, will have a measurable impact on our gauge, ASMs and overall ASM through each quarter of 2022, which Gerry will detail shortly.
We also continue to expect that our international long-haul flying will enter a strong period of margin improvement versus the last cycle as we enter H2 of 2022. We expect that new capacity to Africa, India and the Middle East will mostly offset lower capacity to Asia for the foreseeable future. We continue to watch international demand carefully, but expect a recovery in close-in demand post Omicron. The booking curve for the Atlantic proved shorter than usual in 2021, and we expect to have the same repeat of performance for 2022. As of now, bookings for the Atlantic for the peak travel season are on track, and we've seen some relaxation in border controls to Israel and England. We are working closely with our global partners as we build back our international network.
Late last year, we announced a great new partnership with Virgin Australia. United is the leading carrier to Australia, and we believe this partnership will allow us to quickly and more profitably resume our flight schedule, to Australia. We're on track to create the best onboard product by introducing United's signature interior. We've now taken delivery of 16 737 MAX 8s with this interior. We're also making progress on our plan to modify the remainder of our narrow-body jets so that by early 2025, the entire mainline fleet will have this consistent and superior look and feel. Our future fleet will have an increased premium mix with premium seats per departure in North America up to 75% by 2026.
It is worth noting that in Q4 of 2019 we've already started to produce new records in ancillary revenue generated by seat upgrades by our leisure customers. This trend of selling more premium products to leisure customers represents a meaningful amount of potential upside to our United Next revenue plans and can also help cushion the impact of business traffic in the event it doesn't fully return. As several of our largest competitors have reduced the size of their business class cabin by about 10% on global long-haul flights, we expect that to continue, and as a result, there is a structural change that we see in the long-haul international service. Late in 2021, we were pleased to be recognized in the latest BTN survey completed by industry procurement leaders.
These leaders clearly saw and rewarded our efforts to win their business, separating United from the bulk of the industry. We improved in every category, and we believe these results signify the hard work we're putting into winning an ever-increasing share of their corporate business, which again is a core component of our United Next plan. Thanks to the entire United team. With that, I'll hand it off to Gerry to discuss our financial results and outlook.
Thanks, Andrew. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first call of the new year. While we all would have preferred to be further along in the recovery, you will see from our results for 2021 and forecast for this year that we continue to make great progress and are well positioned to achieve the long-term goals we've discussed with you since last June. Turning to the numbers. For the full year of 2021, we reported a pre-tax loss of $2.6 billion and an adjusted pre-tax loss of $5.8 billion. For Q4 of 2021, we reported pre-tax loss of $845 million and an adjusted pre-tax loss of $679 million. Our CASM-ex increased 13% on capacity down 23%, both versus Q4 of 2019.
While CASM-ex was within our guidance range for the quarter, it was slightly higher than the midpoint as a result of Omicron-related expenses. Looking to Q1 of 2022, there are two major factors impacting our CASM-ex. First, because of Omicron, as Andrew mentioned, we are adjusting capacity downwards to align with demand, consistent with the agile pivoting we've done throughout the crisis. Secondly, we currently expect that our 52 Pratt & Whitney-powered 777s will mostly remain grounded through Q1 . This reduction in flying keeps our aircraft utilization down about 16% in Q1 versus 2019 and does drive additional cost inefficiencies. Q1 2022 capacity is expected to be down between 16% and 18%, with CASM-ex expected to be up between 14% and 15% versus Q1 of 2019.
The math associated with flying fewer ASMs than originally expected, together with the added Omicron-related expense, is driving around three points of expected CASM-ex pressure in the quarter. By Q4 of 2022, however, our base case assumption is that we are past Omicron and flying a schedule with capacity up around 5% versus Q4 of 2019. In this scenario, our utilization would reach near 2019 levels with gauge up about 16% versus the fourth quarter of 2019 and up 11 points versus Q1 of this year, driven by the return of CASM-friendly 777s and the addition of 787s and larger 737 MAX aircraft.
These factors, together with the full run rate benefit of our identified $2.2 billion in structural cost reductions, which we expect to achieve by this summer, was driving material change in our CASM-ex performance over the course of the year, from up 14%-15% in Q1 to down around 2% in Q4 this year, in each case, compared to 2019. As I mentioned, these figures represent our current base case assumption for our 2022 flying. as Andrew outlined, we are committed to aligning our and we will continue to be flexible given the uncertainty around the pace of recovery. As a result of this uncertainty, we expect our CASM-ex results for the full year of 2022 could fall anywhere in a range of scenarios.
You may recall in October, we said our planned capacity for 2022 would be up around 5% versus 2019, with CASM-ex lower than 2019. Our outlook on CASM-ex remains consistent with this prior outlook, though, since we now expect our capacity for the year to be below 2019 levels, we must adjust our CASM-ex to take into account the impact of fixed costs spread over fewer ASMs. To provide some further bookend, if capacity for the year were about flat to 2019, we expect our CASM-ex would be up 2%-3% versus 2019. If full year 2022 capacity is 5% below 2019, we expect our CASM-ex will be up about 5% versus 2019. We believe our results will land between those figures on a full year basis.
Most importantly, we expect CASM-ex to improve throughout the year as our gauge on aircraft utilization materially improve in H2 and expect to end the year with CASM-ex below 2019 levels, as I noted earlier. Most importantly, Q4 expected run rate for CASM-ex will put us well on track for our United Next cost plan for 2023 and beyond. Turning to fleet. We currently expect to take delivery of 53 737 MAX aircraft and 8 787 aircraft during the year. As we noted on our previous earnings calls, the 787 aircraft were originally expected to deliver in H1 of 2021. We now no longer expect to take these 787 aircraft until after the summer of 2022, contributing to about 1.5 points less capacity versus our original plan.
Given this timing, we now expect our adjusted CapEx in 2022 to be around $4.2 billion plus about $1.7 billion of adjusted CapEx that moved out of 2021 into 2022 for a total of about $3.9 billion for the full year. To be clear, our total adjusted CapEx plans for the years 2021 and 2022 together have not changed since June of last year.
There has simply been a timing shift driven by aircraft delivery delays. We continue to expect to use a mix of debt financing, leases, and cash to fund the acquisition of new aircraft depending on market conditions, while tracking towards our United Next leverage target. Importantly, we had over $20 billion in liquidity, including our undrawn revolver, a strong cash position to continue to navigate the remainder of the crisis. In closing, I'd like to thank my finance team as they have worked countless hours over the last 2 years to create and manage a flexible financial plan in response to a quickly evolving environment. We will continue to focus on appropriately managing our capacity and rebuilding our business back efficiently. We've observed that the impact of each variant on our business has decreased with each iteration, and we continue to expect COVID-19 to become endemic in the future.
We remain confident in our 2023 and 2026 United Next financial targets and our trajectory to maximize earnings power for the long term in the coming years. With that, I'll pass it back to Kristina to start the Q&A.
Thank you, Gerry. We will now take questions from the analyst community. Please limit yourself to one question and, if needed, one follow-up question. Brandon, please describe the procedure to ask a question.
Thanks, Kristina. The question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically. If you'd like to ask a question, please dial star followed by one on your touch-tone phone. If you'd like to be removed from the queue, please press the pound sign or the hash key. If you're on a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Once again, if you do have a question, please dial star one on your phone keypad. Please hold for a moment while we assemble our queue. From MKM Partners, we have Conor Cunningham. Please go ahead.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for the time. When we think about United and the opportunity set that's ahead of you know, international landscape is clearly what people talk about the most as the pandemic looks to sputter out. Just curious on your expectations have changed in terms of pent-up demand for international. Clearly, you know, Asia is gonna take some time, but the European countries right now are starting to quickly ease restrictions as cases decline, which is super bullish for this spring and summer demand timeframe. Just curious on how things have changed from a high level from your thought process.
Thanks, Conor. It's Andrew. It's a really good question, and it's something we strongly believe in based on everything we've seen. We've definitely pointed a lot of incremental capacity across the Atlantic for this spring and summer in anticipation of this recovery. I can tell you, in fact, we're booked ahead from a passenger and revenue perspective on those flights this spring and summer already. We're ready to get flying. We do need to get past this latest Omicron wave, but we feel really good about the future. More importantly, you know, we kept all of our wide-body jets in our fleet.
We continue to modify them with the new business class cabins, so we have a consistent product across the range of our aircraft, and we operate from the best gateways in the United States, bar none. We do believe very strongly that there is tremendous international growth opportunity in front of us. We also believe that there's been significant structural changes, smaller business class cabins coming in from the United States, and in fact, fewer flights. Many of those larger A380s and 747s have been retired by our competitors, and this sets us up incredibly well for the future year. I have to admit, we're very bullish about the Atlantic in particular. As you stated, Asia is gonna be slower to come back.
We look forward to coming back in full force, but we have redeployed our planes for the foreseeable future to other regions of the world in anticipation of a slower recovery in Asia. We think we have that from a revenue and P&L point of view under control as well. Really bullish about the future when it comes to international growth and United's potential in that arena, we think is superior to all of our competition.
Okay, great. When you embarked on the mid-con strategy and laid out, you know, United Next, you know, loyalty was a huge component of that. You know, right or wrong, I think a lot of investors view airline loyalty as just one big pie. Just curious if you could talk about, you know, how, you know, new sign-ups or maybe unique sign-ups have been for the loyalty program or credit card, or if you have any conversion figures from other airlines that United has seen, you know, as the, you know, the operations improved over the years and so on. Thanks again for the time.
Sure. We signed up 5.6 million new MileagePlus members this year, which is a record for the airline. We are really pleased by that, and it shows the growth and the prosperity in the program, and people wanna be part of that program and be part of United. We don't think it could be any better. In terms of credit card acquisitions, new accounts, we are up in the second half of this year versus where we were in 2019, so that's going incredibly well, as well. You know, we're really optimistic about those particular numbers.
In particular with the new members, you know, it's just a few years ago, we were doing 2.5-3 million new members per year, and now we're up to 5.6. I think it's a great tribute to United, where we fly, our brand, our customers are more and more interested in joining the MileagePlus program.
From JP Morgan, we have Jamie Baker. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, everybody. The strength in premium leisure is obviously an important topic, but there's some debate as to its sustainability, you know, are consumers permanently creating a, you know, a better flight experience, and therefore they'll refuse to ever return to the back of the cabin, or if it's just a temporary, you know, phenomenon driven by pent-up demand. To the extent that it is the former, are you seeing this elsewhere across the travel ribbon? I mean, for example, are club memberships showing commensurate strength? Are new card acquisitions, you know, skewing to the Infinity card? I'm just wondering how broad the evidence is supporting the thesis that a large segment of your consumers are truly pursuing a better overall experience.
Well, Jamie, what I think I would say is, we're gonna need some time to prove that out. I think it is, you know, somewhat debatable. We feel really good about it, and the numbers have been incredibly strong. Our seat product upgrades in this last quarter have never been higher. You know, that's even before we begin to transform into the United Next fleet, which has more premium seats on board the aircraft. You know, we feel really strongly about segmenting our business and giving people a choice about where they wanna sit on the airplane and what experience they want throughout the entire travel journey. Everybody deserves that choice, and we're gonna do it great.
In terms of club memberships, you know, what I would tell you is the bulk of our club memberships come through our premium card, through the co-brand portfolio.
Mm-hmm.
It'll be hard to measure that because we've introduced two new lower tier cards this year. The numbers are skewed by our new Gateway Card, for example.
Okay.
It's a little bit more difficult to particularly answer that question right now. You know, we've now seen this for two quarters in a row, really strong premium leisure demand. Everything we see in the first quarter would say the same is true. We also see that in the business class cabin going to and from Europe, where the performance there has been good. The other thing I'll tell you is that, while clearly PRASM has been down throughout this crisis, PRASM domestically in our premium cabins is almost flat, whereas you know the number in total in terms of PRASM. That's a remarkable number as we go through this crisis, in terms of premium demand, in my opinion.
Thank you, Andrew. As a follow-up to that, a question on pricing. It feels like the booking curve for consumers is increasingly similar to what corporate used to look like. You know, so consumers are booking closer in, but it feels like business travelers are now booking further out. First, is that a fair characterization? Two, do you think you could still, you know, achieve pre-COVID corporate yields? You know, are sufficient fare fences in place, or does a further booking corporate buyer imply lower yields? I guess that's the question.
Some of that's TBD, to be honest. What I would say is that business traffic is down substantially. It had, you know, improved quite a bit as we were in the quarter last year. The booking curves are, I think, a little bit unreliable from, you know, where will they be, you know, two, three or four months from now. I think we just have to wait a little bit longer than that. Until, you know, demand really comes back to some level of normalcy across all those channels, you know, the yield calculations are just gonna be a little bit differently.
Okay.
You know, what I would say is that, particularly with business traffic and total business, our total traffic, we've seen a remarkable, you know, comeback, already in week 3 of the year versus where we were in week 1 of the year for total bookings and for business bookings. So we're well on our way, and I think, you know, we're gonna see things return to normal from a booking perspective, I would hope sometime in mid-February. Cancellation rates early this week are actually already back to more or less 2019 standards.
Okay.
Things have moved dramatically just in the last 2.5-3 weeks.
Excellent. Thank you for the clarity, Andrew. Take care.
From Raymond James, we have Savanthi Syth. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Just curious on the cargo revenue side, you know, that's held up well and getting better than what you would have expected earlier in 2021. There seems to be a lot of dedicated freight accompanying capacity coming on, so I'm not sure it, you know, seems to be making up for lost belly space. I was curious if you know, what you expect in terms of cargo revenue trends for this year, and maybe if there's any kind of structurally something changed longer term.
Sure. I'll try to take that. You know, I think what we're seeing is there's been a disruption in supply chains around the globe. The use of air freight has increased, or the need for it has increased relative to the amount of capacity available, and that's caused yields to go up. As we look into Q1, I think those trends are pretty similar. In fact, we expect our Q1 performance this year to be in excess of our Q1 performance last year. You know, it's still early in the quarter, obviously, driven by these strong yields.
You know, if you talk to our cargo team, they would tell you that the supply chain disruptions, the backups at the ports, these things look likely to continue into some degree for the foreseeable future as we head into 2022. We're optimistic that cargo is gonna have another great year. Kudos to our entire cargo team because the numbers we are putting up relative to our competition are just staggering.
Great point. Along the lines of kind of something changing near term, like the cuts to service and kind of some of the small markets, you know, the small markets was a big push for United not long ago. Do you see this kind of issue resolving itself, you know, as you get into 2023 or something? Is there kind of a need to change strategy here, at least when it comes to the regional operation and small market operation?
Sure. I'll try to take that. I'm taking all the questions here. I need to hand out a few questions to my colleagues. You know, we first of all, what I would say is that, you know, as we take away service from small communities, we're disappointed to do that. We know the impact on these communities, and we alert them ahead of time, and we know it's a big deal. We've already cut service to 20 communities in the United States in the last few months. Again, we know that's a really big deal. However, we are facing a pilot shortage on our regional aircraft, not on our mainline aircraft. We expect that pilot shortage to continue for a while, including for the rest of 2022.
We do expect, unfortunately, there'll be a few more communities that we will have to remove from the network. We're still working out those details, and we have a lot of aircraft that we will underutilize for the foreseeable future. That's kind of where we are. In terms of you know, our business plan, when we talked about the United Next business plan, just about seven months ago, we had already kind of recognized these trends. We had already planned to reduce the number of RJs in our fleet, and what's happening is an acceleration of those plans. From a revenue perspective, this has all been accounted for. Unfortunately, from an internal planning perspective, what we're seeing on the RJ pilot shortage is an acceleration.
What happens to the communities we serve is an acceleration, but it is not unexpected for what we're really gonna deal with over the next year or two.
That sounds super helpful. Thank you.
From Bernstein, we have David Vernon. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the time. Gerry, I was wondering if you could help us think about kind of the exit rate of CASM. It sounds like it's gonna be much better than the start of the year because of some gauge increases. Can you talk about sequentially how gauge is increasing and kind of that, you know, what's a good foundation on which to start building out a CASM outlook for 2023? 'Cause I know there's the growth we're getting sequentially in the volume recovery. Just trying to separate out how much of that is not sort of volume dependent, how much of that is coming out of gauge.
Good question. We've been clear since last June that one of the benefits that's really in some ways unique to United with our United Next plan is the increase in gauge. We've been under-gauged on the mainline, and the MAX order, particularly when the MAX 10s start next year, will help solve that problem. We will provide going into next year, you know, additional color on gauge. This year, you know, just from the Q1 - Q4 , we expect about 11% improvement in gauge, and then more going into next year.
We'll continue to give you those numbers, but as we've been saying for the last six months, you know, one of the great advantages we have, and one of the reasons why we're so comfortable with our CASM guidance for next year is that, as we said, it's just math.
Yeah. Sequentially, as we go through the quarters, is there an inflection point when that gauge really kind of pops upside the deliveries or schedule changes?
Yeah. Well, two things. One, you know, the 777, you know, won't start impacting us until Q2 . Then the 8 787s which are still hanging out there, you know, that'll be a H2 , as well as the 53 MAXes, effectively all in H2 of the year. Most, the vast majority in H2 of the year. There is a huge difference between H1 and H2 on gauge.
All right. That's super helpful. Thank you. One last one for me. The other OpEx line kind of bumped up sequentially $225 million a quarter for the last two quarters. Are we at a budget level of around $140 million per quarter for that other OpEx line, or how should we be thinking about that number? We're getting to 80%-85% of 2019 levels of cost on that line, and I'm just wondering if there's structural takeout. I would assume some of it's in there. What absolute number for that other OpEx line should we be looking at for 2022 per quarter?
Yeah, I think we've hit about the right run rate within $200 million.
Okay. Thanks a lot for the time, guys.
Sure.
From Cowen and Company, we have Helane Becker. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, operator. Hi, everybody, and thank you very much for the time. Oil prices have gone up over $85, and I know there's gonna be a lot of fuel efficiency with the newer aircraft that are coming in. How should we think about the way you're thinking about fuel vis-à-vis pricing and the lag between the two?
Sure, Helane. I'll start. You know, traditionally, I think we had gotten to the point where we had a high degree of confidence that fuel was a pass-through. You know, I've said that many times in the past, and I continue to believe that. You know, during the crisis with the supply-demand equation quite out of balance, I think that has got out of balance. As we look into you know, Q2 and beyond, based on what we think can happen to demand and where we see supply, hopefully those relationships come back into place. You know, we'll continue to make agile decisions on utilization of the fleet given what the price of fuel is like we always have done in the past.
I feel like we need a little bit more time to prove back that the equation is still valid. We're well on our way.
Okay. My other question is, I don't know how to think about this, but I, you know, I know Asia traffic's not coming back anytime soon, but there's a lot of cargo that you can do in that market, so it makes sense to have capacity there. But when you think about what the Chinese are doing, I mean, I feel like they're in violation of the bilateral agreement that they signed.
I'm kind of wondering if part of what they're doing in not allowing you your full complement of flights has to do with the Olympics versus you know, them being difficult with quarantine rules and so on, so that as you think about rebuilding Asia, China's not on the list of countries beyond maybe one or two cities, and you think about, like, the rest of Southeast Asia. Not sure who should answer that.
Well, I'll start, Helane, and then let Andrew talk about our specific plans. What I'd say is on the Asia restrictions. Look, governments around the world are all doing their best to manage COVID and the restrictions are constantly changing. They've had a different set of standards in China, a different approach than some of the Western. I don't think there's anything bigger to read into it other than different countries, you know, are all feeling their way in an uncertain environment. I wouldn't read any kind of macro geopolitical questions into it. I'll turn it back to Andrew to talk about sort of what our plans for aircraft and timing are.
Thank you.
The only thing I would add is that, you know, we recognize that Asia will have a slower recovery, and we have moved those aircraft elsewhere in the world, and we believe they're gonna be really productive where we've moved them to. We look forward to resuming our full schedule to Japan and China at some point in the future when we can.
Okay. Well, thank you very much
From Evercore ISI, we have Duane Pfennigwerth. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks so much. Good morning. Wanted to ask you a couple questions. One, just on changeability, which is probably where, you know, the industry was headed, anyway, and you can refresh our recollection there. Obviously we're in a weird time still. It's improving, but it's a weird time. There is an impact on, you know, operations and perhaps, you know, call center resources and things of that sort with respect to changeability. Are you guys thinking at all about that kind of over the intermediate term, again, in a more normal demand environment? You know, is some of the pure kind of frictionless changeability maybe too much of a strain to support?
Well, I think the way I would describe that is, you know, we've made a number of changes as we've dealt with this crisis, including the elimination of change fees themselves, that we think was the right thing to do. We should have done it years ago, quite frankly. We wish we had done it years ago. We don't think that's gonna change, or at least United, you know, we are where we are. We've adjusted our resources to make sure we can deal with that. Our customers now have the ability to, you know, make more changes than they did in the past and are doing so, and we're kind of pleased to let that happen.
We think it's a great feature for us and it's gonna help us with our relative competitive stance versus other carriers in the country, which again, we needed to do long ago. It's about time. We're fully committed to it.
Appreciate those thoughts. I wondered if there wasn't maybe a, you know, a fare category or something like that. Not that you'd tell me now in advance, but maybe a fare category where it didn't make sense. Just to follow up to Savi's question on the regional constraints. You know, do you have any anecdotes? I mean, some markets are gonna be, you know, no longer addressable. Do you have any anecdotes of markets that you've maintained where you've sort of swapped it out? Does it by default imply lower frequency or, you know, does it push you into some new markets? If you could just talk about that more broadly, maybe from a network perspective.
I don't think it pushes us into new markets, but as we've classified this, there are places that have fewer flights and there are unfortunately places that have no flights. We continue to adjust the formula. Again, for the most part, we anticipated this. The big difference here is this is occurring at a faster pace than maybe we anticipated 6-9 months ago. It's just accelerating our United Next plan and where we're gonna go to. There will be communities that unfortunately don't have United service in the future, and there will be communities that have fewer flights, and there will be communities that have fewer flights with bigger aircraft. That's kind of the outlook.
We don't, again, you know, I said it a few minutes ago, we don't expect this to really materially improve in 2022. We'll see where we go in 2023.
Thanks so much.
From Jefferies, we have Sheila Kahyaoglu. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the time. Maybe if we could just think about your United Next targets. I know they're far out, but, you know, how do we think about the inflationary expectations you're baking into those targets and how they've changed over the past six months?
Well, Sheila, it's fair to say that over the last six months, we've seen more inflationary pressure than we might expect a year ago. That's incorporated in our numbers, in our guidance for this year and our comfort for next year. We've taken that into account. You know, in terms of where we're seeing those inflationary pressures, we're no different, I think, than anyone else. You know, clearly, on the vendor side, airport vendors, we're seeing that. You know, other suppliers like everybody else, when you go to the supermarket, you're seeing higher food prices. We're seeing higher food prices, but we're managing through all that. I can tell you that, you know, on our flights, you know, if beef becomes too expensive, we always have chicken.
Okay. Thank you.
From Goldman Sachs, we have Catherine O'Brien. Please go ahead.
Hey, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for the time. I know there are a range of outcomes on your capacity for this year that's gonna be based on demand, but should we still be thinking about international being the bigger driver as you get back to growth mode later this year? Like, if we end up with flat capacity, which is one of your bookends, should we expect domestic to be down underlying that? Thanks.
You know, I will say the plans are still agile. We are gonna fly less international than we expected to just a few months ago. We're also gonna fly less domestic. You know, whether in 100% proportion to each other, I think it's just too early to tell. I'm gonna refrain from you know, giving you the exact answer to that question.
Okay. Got it. Fair enough. Just on the forward demand outlook, I don't wanna read too much into your word choices. I think in the release you said you're optimistic about spring and excited about summer. You know, should we read this as you're seeing bookings come in stronger than what you're seeing for spring, as maybe consumers are just more optimistic about, you know, COVID by the time we get to this summer? Or just would love to hear kind of like how the bookings are looking right now, maybe over the next four or five months based on what you've got on the books today. Thanks so much.
Sure. I'll give it a try. You know, the first thing I'll say is that when the Omicron spike happened, that what really happened was, cancellations peaked, particularly for close-in travel, and net bookings declined as a result of that, but total bookings also declined as a result of that. But all of that impact was really felt close in and not far out. We were continuing to book March, for example, normally throughout the entire Omicron process, including from the perspective of our yields, to be blunt.
That continues all the way beyond March, all the way through the summer, where, for example, we look at the Atlantic and we're booked ahead from a passenger count, and we're booked ahead from a revenue perspective, which means our PRASM is obviously positive in the future quarters for the Atlantic. All that is really good. What Omicron did is cause a spike in near-term cancellations and reduction in near-term bookings, particularly for business travel. What I can tell you over the last few weeks, we've already seen that start to come back into line. For example, in week one, we were down 48% versus 2019 for total bookings. In week two of this year, we were down 40%. Now in week three, week to date, we're down 25%.
We are seeing this really come back very quickly. The second point, as I said earlier, our cancellations are also now coming back into normalcy. This really, you know, again, there's a hole in January that we can't fill because it's just too close in, and there's a bit of a hole in February as well. March looks normal at this point, and definitely beyond that based on these trends. Again, bookings are coming back really, really quickly. Hopefully, we will be back to somewhat of a normal stance, or at least where we were, you know, in the middle of the Q4 quarter, sometime by the middle of February.
Okay. Great.
From Deutsche Bank, we have Mike Linenberg. Please go ahead.
Oh, yeah. Hey. Thanks, everyone. Two questions here. One, can you just refresh us on your hiring plans for 2022, more specifically, number of pilots and mechanics? How is the ramp? Is it, you know, spread throughout the year? Is it front-end loaded? Thank you.
Hi, Mike. This is Brett.
Hey, Brett.
Hey. Look, first I'll say in the back half of this year, we were really successful in meeting a lot of our hiring goals. Obviously, we think we'll have no issues in particular on the mainline next year meeting those goals. In terms of pilots, for instance, in back half of this year.
We hired approximately 1,200 pilots. You know, we think that trend will continue in the next year. Our overall numbers for next year we expect to be in line with our needs. We haven't put out specific numbers at this point in time.
Okay, great. Thanks, Brett. Just quickly, Andrew, you know, when I saw the guidance, the release, the March quarter revenue, sort of what you were guiding to relative to others, it was good. It looked more favorable. I'm, you know, given that the March quarter historically has been seasonally much more challenging for you than your competitors, is that reflective, you know, maybe network changes over the last year? Is it cargo driving a bigger piece, ancillary, all the above? You know, really curious what's allowing you to kind of catch up and at least narrow the gap with your competition. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike. I will say that, you know, improving our relative results in Q1 has been one of our long-term goals for many, many years. Obviously, there's a lot going on and a lot of moving pieces in Q1 of this year. All of the factors you just said, and all of us here at United kind of working together to move these things around, has made an impact. Really, you know, I wish the Q1 guidance could be dramatically higher, but we are where we are. I think we're on the right path for long-term, and we're particularly on the right path for making our Q1 results less of a gap to our competitors.
that, of course, will overall help us close margin gaps in the future because we do pretty well in Q2 and Q3, given our global long-haul nature and our East-West nature here domestically.
Great. Thank you.
From Bank of America, we have Andrew Didora. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, everyone. Just kind of wanted to go back to the regional pilot issue and ask maybe a little bit of a different question is, if the regionals are experiencing pilot shortages, do you expect this to eventually could this potentially creep into your mainline hiring plans, particularly given the growth that you guys have ahead of you? If it did creep its way in, would that be a risk to some of your longer term CASM target?
Maybe I'll give it a try. At this point, we've had absolutely no trouble hiring for United mainline pilot jobs. The second point is we are working very hard to make sure that the supply of pilots coming into this great business increases. Given where salaries are, the career potential, we're confident that's gonna happen. Of course, one of the things we've done, which is highlighted a lot, is our Aviate Academy, where we're bringing new students, many of them diverse, into the United Airlines world very early in the process. We're all working to make sure that there's plenty of pilots for the long-term supply, which we think is the case.
We do have, you know, a year or more, where this needs time to get back into proper balance. At this point, we haven't seen any impact to our mainline hiring abilities.
Yes. I guess as a follow-up to that, what, why do you think it's easier to hire into mainline than into the regionals? Is it just basically pay scales? I'm just curious what the kind of what that disconnect is.
I would... I-
Well, I'll take a shot at it, Andrew. You've done a great job today on the call, by the way. I appreciate it.
No, I want you to take a shot at it.
Look, I think this is an important point. The big difference for us at the mainline is that at United, we create careers. They're not just jobs. You know, our average flight attendant, ramp worker, gate agent, back in, you know, in a normal year, once they hit the top of the seniority scale, you know, with good union contracts, makes a six-digit income. Can make a six-digit income with great benefits. You know, it's one of the few jobs, the few places that there are jobs left, you know, where you can support a family and send your kids to college and have great benefits and have security.
I think at the end of the day, that's the reason that we can hire at the mainline is because we create careers where people can spend their whole career here, instead of just, you know, what's the hourly rate today?
Okay. Thanks, Scott.
From UBS, we have Myles Walton. Please go ahead.
Thanks. I think there's a comment. I know Scott on CNBC said second quarter you're targeting profitable or hopes to be profitable. I'm just curious, do you think for the full year you have line of sight for pre-tax profitability? Then maybe, Scott, while you're answering that, if you're answering it, one of the first things that Russia has done in previous instances in response to sanctions is shut down their airspace. Obviously, you get some limited capacity going to Asia at this point, so maybe it's not that big a deal. But relative to your plan for 2022, how disruptive would that be? Thanks.
On the first question, you know, I tried at least on CNBC to say we're trying to get out of the business of short-terming the short-term ups and downs of COVID because we haven't been very good at it. We've been really good at the trajectory, but you know, it's impossible to predict what's gonna happen in the very short term. If we continue on the trajectory that Andrew described, where you know, bookings went from down 48% the first week to down 25% this week, you know, we
We're back on track to be profitable in both Q2 , Q3 and Q4 . It's probably getting to too fine a point to try to add up, which I guess is what you're asking. If I add up Q2 , Q3 and Q4 , are those a number that's greater than the loss in Q1? That's probably too fine a point for me to have confidence in forecasting at this point. On the Russia point, I'm not gonna speculate on that yet. We'll you know, we, United, you know, as the flag carrier for the United States, winds up, you know, being exposed in a good way, exposed in a bad way to geopolitics around the world. We follow them closely and pay attention to them and have a good history of responding when something happens.
We're, like everyone, keeping a close eye on the situation in Ukraine and how it develops.
Okay. Thank you.
From Wolfe Research, we have Hunter Keay. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Just to be completely clear, are you still reiterating the 9% pretax margin, the CASM-ex down 4%, for 2023, and also the 4%-5% capacity CAGR for next year?
Hey, Hunter. It's Gerry. Yes, we're confirming all that.
Okay. Got it. Thank you. You know, to think about the premium seats you're adding, I think you said it was gonna be, like, 60% or something like that. I think most of your top corporates were tech customers flying to Asia. You could argue that both tech and Asia are gonna be the most likely sort of challenged segments to come back geographically and, you know, line of business, whatever you wanna call it. How do you square that? Does this mean maybe fewer wide-bodies out of SFO forever, or is it just more like a timing issue in your mind?
Well, Hunter, forever is a long time, so I don't think I'm gonna agree to forever. But clearly for the foreseeable future, you know, we anticipate having a smaller, you know, footprint across the Pacific, and those airplanes being redeployed elsewhere where they can be more, you know, productive for the business. That's gonna continue for a while. When things change in Asia, we'll be ready to bounce back there. We have great partners in Asia, particularly with ANA in Japan and Air China in China. We're ready to go when demand returns, but it's difficult to predict.
There's no doubt we did well in the business class cabin to Asia, but I can tell you, we did just as well across the Atlantic and to South America. You know, it's one of our strong suits. We feel bullish that Asia is definitely gonna be tame for the next few years from a United Airlines capacity perspective. We're gonna redeploy that capacity where it can be fruitful for the business and fruitful, in particular, in the business class cabin. Again, as I said earlier, we're seeing smaller wide-body jets being used by our primary competitors across the globe. That brings in not only less capacity in total, but you know, significantly less capacity in the business class cabin.
You know, as you try to square a circle that has many different movements to it, what I would tell you is that capacity and demand is all moving. There are plenty of scenarios out there where business traffic across the Atlantic could be less than 100%. But if supply is dramatically less than 100%, it should all work out.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes the investor part of our Q&A. At this time, we will now take questions from the media. Once again, as a reminder, if you have a question, please dial star one on your phone keypad. Standing by. From The Wall Street Journal, we have Alison Sider. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks so much. I'm just curious, you know, talking about the issues with the regionals and the pilot shortage there, how are you thinking about kind of the financial health of all your regional carriers? You know, is this something they can all survive, or do you anticipate any consolidation or any kind of financial turmoil there?
Alison, it's Andrew. I'll let our regional carriers speak for themselves on their financial situation. I just, I can't respond to that.
I guess just you've mentioned sort of not having any trouble hiring pilots at the mainline level, but you know, how about training? Are you seeing any kind of logjams or delays in the training process? Are you seeing any issues you know in your pipeline for mechanics?
From a training perspective, you know, we have our flight training center in Denver, Colorado, and you know, I'll let Brett speak to it, but I think things are really well under control there.
Yeah. We're not seeing any issues with respect to the training process. Just to emphasize again, we're certainly not seeing any issues on the hiring side. We don't anticipate any issues with respect to any hiring across the board that we need to make in order to stay on plan with our mainline operations.
Thanks.
From CNBC, we have Leslie Josephs. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. I'm curious if there are any incentives that you're having to offer around the country in various work groups to attract workers, and if there are any markets that are getting higher wages or signing bonuses, where are those, and where do you see that trend going throughout the year?
Hi, this is Brett Hart. We are taking it market by market, and certainly we are seeing some parts of the country where there is some more difficulty in small pockets for hiring, and we're making necessary adjustments in those markets. Our approach is to take it and adjust that way. We determine what needs to be done in a specific market. We try to maintain consistency across our organization, but we understand that there are different macro and micro economic factors at play, and we're adjusting to those. At this time, I wouldn't call out specific markets.
I mean, I think we're being impacted in the same way that other employers are, both in our industry and quite frankly, across other industries. That information is pretty readily available.
Okay, thanks.
From Bloomberg, we have Justin Bachman. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the time. This might be a question for Gerry. I'm not sure. As far as the full-year capacity plans, I'm wondering if you could discuss a little bit about where the various buckets of that are coming from in terms of the regional pilot issues, the variant demand issues, Boeing 787 delays and those sort of things being pushed back. Could you sort of discuss which areas are contributing to that and in what ways? Thanks.
Justin, it's Andrew. I'll try. I'm not sure if I completely understand the question. There are a number of, you know, categories that cause us to be off from the original 5% guidance for 2022. The first one of those is demand, and the fact that the Omicron variant has kind of hit the industry, as you know. We needed to take some steps to get the plan to reflect that, and we've done that. When you look at the different categories of what's happened, and I don't have a slide in front of me that has the numbers, but I have a slide somewhere that does, is the 777s, 52 grounded aircraft.
Those triple sevens that are grounded normally represent about 10% of our business in total. They're gonna be flying in full force in Q4 this year versus flying in full force for the, you know, first three quarters. That's a big deal. The second one is we've delayed the return to service of a bunch of narrow bodies that we have in storage. I don't have the exact number, but I think in Q4 it was in the neighborhood of 50 or so aircraft. In Q1, it's you know, slightly lower than that number, but still a really significant number. That's also a big category in terms of the ASMs that are missing.
Third, the regional jets, because they are smaller aircraft that fly short distances, when we measure those in terms of ASMs, their impact on the capacity plan is actually quite small. Beyond that, we just have lower utilization again to reflect the demand environment we see. Those are three, I think, you know, of the larger buckets, unless somebody else has a category I'm missing, I think that's how I'd describe that. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, no, that's kind of what I was hoping to hear about. Thanks a lot, Andrew.
From USA TODAY, we have Dawn Gilbertson. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Andrew, I know you'd rather talk about Polaris, but you know, a broad swath of travelers out there on a budget and fly basic economy. I wonder if you could give an update on the trends you're seeing in basic economy. It's been a while since you released any kind of figures on, like, what percentage of bookings are in basic economy, and I'm wondering whether that's changed at all since the pandemic waivers lifted and, you know, they're no longer changeable. Related to that, I wonder if you guys have any plans like Delta did to extend travel credits beyond the current deadline. Thank you.
Good to hear your voice, Dawn. You know, I think what I would say is throughout the crisis, the basic percentage of tickets sold has varied significantly at United. Today it's somewhere in the high single digits domestically. During the crisis, it got as low as 4%, and before the crisis, you know, it was well over 20%. This number is moving around based on all kinds of different things. As a result, as we speak today, it is a much smaller percentage of our ticket sales in our domestic system than it has historically been pre-crisis. I think that's really all I can say. In terms of the tickets, we are evaluating that now.
I'll have more to say about that in the future. Our tickets are currently valid through the end of this year. People still have a ton of time out there to find their credits and burn them on United Airlines.
Thank you very much.
From TPG, we have David Slotnick. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for the question. I have a question about the international routes that you announced, the 5G routes, I think it was, earlier in the fall. What kind of bookings are you seeing on those so far, and are they trending with international bookings overall, or are they a little bit off from the main?
I'll take that. International bookings across the Atlantic, you know, for travel April and beyond, are ahead of 2019 levels. All of our new markets are exactly as their expectations. You know, I will say that each new market has a different booking curve, depending on where we're going, and each of those new markets is running on the booking curve we expected. We really have not seen the virus or Omicron in particular impact our long-haul demand across the Atlantic at this point for future travel.
Okay, thanks. Just a follow-up question to the 5G questions from earlier. There have been a handful of regional jets that have been affected, and we've seen it even today. There was a couple of, I believe, United Express jets that had to divert from San Francisco to Reno. Do you anticipate a continued impact on the network just from the RJ issues?
I think there's a lot yet to be determined. There are modest impacts still from the rollout of 5G. They're not nearly as significant as they were scheduled to be without the agreement that was reached. But more to come. You know, it's still very real-time. We will work, hopefully with the telecoms and the FAA, through the whole process to further reduce the impact. But don't know the full answer yet.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now turn it back to Kristina Munoz for our closing remarks.
Thanks everyone for joining the call today. Please contact Investor and Media Relations if you have any further questions, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.
Okay. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining, and you may now disconnect.