Here's a snippet... Typical deflection from management:

Joseph DeNardi

Jude, I am just wondering just given your new COO, if you could just comment on what the operational challenges you faced in 2015 were and what you plan to do to correct them. Then I think investors struggle a little bit with given some of the headlines that come out trying to decipher between what are real safety issues that the airline and what is maybe overhyped by the media, so I am wondering if you could comment on some of that, are they are safety issues that need to be addressed or is it more subtle than that?

Jude Bricker

Let me start with the safety point, no. There is not the safe operation last year, and there will be safe operation this year as well. Operational challenges that we had over the last several months really had to do mainly with the growth that we were putting through our network and that manifest itself in a couple of different ways. The first is that we are taking on a lot of new airplanes and they have been slow to come up to the fleet average reliability and we will still work through those issues, the reminder of the first and second quarters.

More materially, we continue to struggle with crew availability as our training pipeline tries to catch up with fleet growth, so we think to that will have been solve by the end of the first quarter and continue to improve to where we were in a small surplus accrues by the end of summer period, so I think we are on top of those two main issues. Combined now with slowdown in the growth rate, so our year-over-year by quarter comps for capacity growth will decline as the year progresses, so first quarter will the fastest growing quarter and then each successive quarter after that will slow down a bit.

I think the main issues is just us catching up the operation to where the network has been and most of the solutions to that program, to that endeavor are already in work and we will get there.

Now, your other point was that a lot of what you read about us in the press, what is the source to that? Why is that out there? Maybe Maury if you want to comment on that.

MauryGallagher

Well, I think, Joe, maybe a simplest answer, but we are in negotiations with our pilots and particularly the Teamsters have a history of this tactic of making sure all of you packables are out there and available for everybody to see and papers and media are where juicy type of story in many cases, so every airline has operational issues. As I tell our people, the systems are setup to deal with problems when you have people and machinery, you are going to have issues with those and a safe environment such as what the FAA and the NTSB have put together allow for those to be anticipated and corrected accordingly.

Certainly you go for root cause and you are looking into all the particular as to why things happen, but we have invested tremendously in safety system over the last few years, the FAA has suggested as many as seven voluntary safety systems and we are in all of them. We have a terrific ASMs program if you are familiar with that, so as I tell people this industry is all-in-all [ph] safety and we are currently at the forefront of all of those respects.

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