Originally Posted by
Judge Smails
In all fairness, and I listened to the last conference call, Bumbling Bob did not call us a stepping stone airline. I'm the last person to defend management, but that statement did not happen.
He sidestepped the question completely. It was a reporter who asked about being a stepping stone.
Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Hey. Good morning, everybody. Bob, a question on how you intend to position Spirit within the industry. I mean for passengers and investors, you made it clear. I'm wondering about the pilot perspective. On one hand, you may want to keep Spirit as sort of a springboard to more lucrative mainland flying, you know place where you move quickly into the left seat and then on to greener pastures. The other extreme you may want it to be considered the first and final place that pilots live out their career. So any one of us can draw conclusions on what happens in terms of future labor costs, but understanding how you feel Spirit should be positioned in the eyes of aviators could help us with that process.
Robert L. Fornaro - Spirit Airlines, Inc.
Well, it's – Jamie, it's a good question. It's also a tricky question because we are in mediation and that process does take time. I think, again, as a starting point given the trends of pilot pay is moving up, and now we're towards the bottom with Frontier on the low end. And so we expect and believe our pilots deserve a raise, but we also have to look at some of the underlying work rules that go with the agreements.
And I guess the one comment I would make is we think there's a lot of opportunities where our contract is deficient (48:45) versus some of the other carriers in terms of work rules, in terms of some of the ability to run the airline. And we think and, quite frankly, we're willing to trade off increases for some of that flexibility that we should have. Again, our contracts were not written for the carrier that we've become. So we're not working off a blueprint.
And so we think there's a real opportunity here for the company to get substantial benefit and for our pilots to get good increases. And I think, again, that will create some cost but perhaps not as much as you might expect because we think there's a lot of opportunity to reduce our pilot efficiency. Okay?