A fun little nugget from the Q4 earnings call.



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Unidentified Analyst

Hey, good morning. This is Jake on for Duane. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned right sizing the labor cost. If that's coming from headcount, can you quantify how overstaffed you are in what particular groups? And then just relating to commentary on the last call, are you seeing the same as the rest of the industry regarding improving pilot staffing?



Ted Christie

Thanks for the question. This is Ted. I'll start. Maybe, Scott, you want to jump in. So as I stated, we moved full bore into hiring to hit what we thought was going to be a full utilization airline on a much bigger fleet as we were moving through the second half of 2023. And that did not materialize.

We're going to be, as Scott said, down on average 25 airplanes from where we thought we would be. By the time we hit the end of the year, it's 40. And so, that's a lot of staffing, and that's across the Board. It's everything from our frontline people, our pilots, our flight attendants, the folks at the airports, quite frankly, even the general administrative workforce has some more direct related expense associated with it when you get bigger.

So, we're working with all those various constituents to come up with solutions. We already have some progress on that. I hesitate to give you a number right now, but last year we alluded to the fact that we're pursuing $100 million in structural cost enhancements, and it's sort of tied to that. So it at least gives you some guidance on the bucket.

And then as to your question on pilot staffing, we saw the warm start to turn a little bit in the middle part of last year, and attrition really started to, go down for us. And I've heard similar comments from other airlines as well. So it sounds like all the work that the industry is doing collectively to create more opportunities for pilots to get training, to move through the process, is bearing some fruit.

And we're starting to see, once again, the principles of supply and demand working the way it's supposed to. Wages have gone up for pilots. There's more opportunity for prospective pilots to find options to get trained and to become a professional pilot, and that's beginning to bear fruit. So I think we are starting to get closer and closer in balance. You want to add anything more?

Scott Haralson

No, I think you hit on that. I think that's the point is when we think about hiring crew, it's well in advance of taking deliveries of airplanes. And so when the AOG issue started to materialize in the back half of last year, we had to react and the number of resources that we had internally was already embedded into the business.

So, this is reallyall about rightsizing our cost and a lot of that is labor, as Ted mentioned to the size of the business. And that will be muted in 2024 and 2025 and maybe even beyond that. So part of what we're going to do is figure out the right staffing levels in all components of the business to make sure they're fit for where we are.