Originally Posted by Judge Smails

Here's the transcript of the most interesting part of the call this morning:

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Okay. And as a followup to that, Bob, I know you want to avoid negotiating in public, but the industry wage bar is rising at a pretty rapid clip for aviators and your cost structure obviously is already quite lean. Is it inevitable that the next pilot contract reduces margins? I mean, when I think about the flexibility that some of your competitors have, they can densify, they can make offsetting revisions to profit sharing, they can add back seats, that kind of stuff. I mean you're already doing all of that stuff. So am I missing something?

Robert L. Fornaro - President, Chief Executive Officer & Class III Director

No, I think, there are again a couple of differences and like I said, in terms of pricing, there are tiers. You have, again, Frontier and Allegiant well below us and that's...

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Yes.

Robert L. Fornaro - President, Chief Executive Officer & Class III Director

...our peer group, and you move into another bracket, you have JetBlue slightly above us and then you actually have the legacies, and I think there is a context for all this stuff. And in terms of what we offer, we offer fast growth, our pilots become captains much earlier than their peers.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Yes.

Robert L. Fornaro - President, Chief Executive Officer & Class III Director

And there is a benefit of that. And so there is a benefit of maintaining a higher growth rate. And that's what we primarily offer. None of the large carriers can get you to that left seat in a couple of years and that's a primary advantage. That's a primary reason or a key reason for coming here and quite frankly the longer we can maintain a higher growth rate that will provide the best benefit to the pilot group. So that's kind of the context that we're thinking about and like I said that's the way we will approach our negotiations.


He's either completely delusional, or feeding the Wall St analysts what they want to hear.