Originally Posted by Finessed

The only thing United airlines does well is lose a **** ton of money. Every earnings call it’s the same pathetic routine. Scott does his little Kangaroo dance and tells everyone how woke he is. “United’s changing the world” one massive expense at a time. Take on massive new debt, why not! Hey did we tell you about our 30 diversity hires! The program is costing us 10’s of millions to finance, but hey maybe in 3 years time 20 out of the 30 will be employees at the greatest airline at losing money in the world. It’s almost like you and AA“G” are in a competition for who can file for BK first.

I do love your earnings calls though… Kirby talking nothing about how they’re actually going to make money. Then finally after the kangaroo dance is over…. The numbers guy comes on. What’s his name? Gerry, right? I love it when he comes on, because every time I’ve had the pleasure of listening to Gerry speak, it’s how much money United’s lost for the quarter.

Here’s a little sneak peak from the recent Q’s “earnings” call from my boy Gerry.

“Turning to the numbers. For the full year 2021, we reported a pretax loss of $2.6 billion and an adjusted pretax loss of $5.8 billion. For the fourth quarter of 2021, we reported pretax loss of $845 million and an adjusted pretax loss of $679 million. Our CASM-ex increased 13% on capacity down 23%, both versus the fourth quarter 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 the first quarter 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-powered 777s will mostly remain grounded through the first quarter. This reduction in flying keeps our aircraft utilization down about 16% in the first quarter versus 2019 and does drive additional cost inefficiencies.”

You talk big for a guy who works at an airline that couldn’t operate a lemonade stand at a profit.