Doug Parker
Analyst · Cowen. Your line is now open
Thank you, Dan. Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm going to give some color on the work we're doing to manage the current environment, ensure that we are well positioned when we come out of this crisis. Derek is going to provide an update on our liquidity and cash burn. And then as Dan noted, we have several Executives in the room, including our President Robert Isom and our Chief Revenue Officer Vasu Raja, here to answer any questions you may have. So to begin, I need to acknowledge and applaud the entire America West Airlines team. Thus past the past five months have been more than difficult, and our team has consistently risen to the challenge, taking care of customers and each other, as the stability of the of their own employment remains uncertain. Our team does this and much more each and every day. Say, they're leading this -- leading to this crisis with grace is an understatement of enormous proportions. And we're all humbled by their work ethic and professionalism. Till now the actions we're taking to face the COVID-19, the resulting severe instruction to global demand for air travel. In short, the crisis continues. Our team has done an exceptional job of managing through that crisis, as evidenced by the trends we saw throughout the second quarter. And we're prepared to weather the storm ahead and be in a position to succeed when demand recovers. In the near-term, our actions are centered on three pillars, building up our cash reserves, conserving the cash we do use, and adjusting the way we fly, so that when our customers return to the skies, they can do so with complete confidence, confidence they are safe and they enjoyable to do so. And moreover, we're flying when and where they want to go. So first of on cash, we have the second quarter with $10.2 billion of available liquidity, which included an important net $3.6 billion that we raised during the course of the Capital Markets. We also have a sign term sheet with the U.S. Department of Treasury for an additional $4.75 billion secured loan under the CARES Act. And we expect that loan to close in the third quarter. In addition, we announced this morning two senior secured note transaction with both transactions with Goldman Sachs Merchant Bank, totaling $1.2 million. So, when those transactions are combined with our quarter ending liquidity balance of $10.2 million, we would have a Pro Forma liquidity balance of approximately $16.2 million. And we'll have flexibility to raise more if needed and Derek will talk about that in a few minutes. With regard to conserving cash and our cash burn, our daily cash burn rate for the quarter was around $55 million, which was better than our prior guidance of $70 million per day. We were particularly pleased with the rate of improvements [indiscernible]. That daily burn was nearly $100 million per day in April, then around $56 million in May, and was $30 million for -- per day for the month of June. That improvement was driven by both aggressive cost management which Derek will discuss in more detail and significant revenue growth throughout the period. As to revenue, demand was at its lowest point in April, of course, and we had a remarkably low system load factor of 15% and a remarkably low passenger revenue price at [$1.08]. But as several States began to reopen, we began to see demand increase, particularly in some markets where we had a network advantage. So, with some aircraft ownership and labor costs we made a tactical decision to file a larger schedule than some of our competitors, competitors then keeping our large connecting hubs in Dallas/Fort Worth in Charlotte larger than the rest of our network. So anymore that larger schedule we saw increasing loads and unit revenues across the system. Our load factors jumped from 15% in April to 45% in May, and 64% in June. And our passenger revenue per ASM increased from that [$1.08] in April to [$6.09] in May and [$10.03] in June. How's the DFW in Charlotte performed particularly well, with 80% of our flights operating in over 60% load factors throughout the month of June? Now this rate of approval is going to slow as we head into a seasonally softer travel season. And certainly as demand growth is planned sort of late due to increasing infection rates and State and City quarantine restrictions. We've modified our schedules accordingly. And we now expect our third quarter system capacity to be down approximately 60% year-over-year. As to cash burn trends, we expect our third quarter burn rates to be well below our second quarter rates and our fourth quarter rates to be lower than the third. Our goal is to be cash positive in 2021, as demand for air travel gradually improves. Regarding liquidity, we expect in the third quarter of approximately $13 billion and that assumes no additional financing activity in addition to -- other than those transactions I already mentioned. As to restoring cost of consumer demand. One of the best things we can do during this crisis is to put our energy toward winning customer confidence. To that end, we've established a travel Health Advisory Panel comprised of internal leaders from our operations teams, and outside experts to advise us on health and cleaning matters throughout our operation. We've also started working with the global Bio Risk Advisory Council on Accreditation for the cleaning and disinfection practices for our aircraft [air landings]. These steps along with more generous change fee waivers and rebooking opportunities for full flights had helped our customers feel good about flying and feel very good about choosing America. Looking outlook, we're building an even more robust network for our customers. Last week, we announced a new partnership with JetBlue that will provide seamless connectivity for travelers in the Northeast, and create more choice for customers across our complimentary domestic international network. The JetBlue partnership and the West Coast alliance with Alaska that we announced earlier this year will further strengthen our network and will help to ensure we're positioned for success over the long-term. So as good as we feel that our management is in this pandemic and our prospects for future success, we feel terribly about the impact it's having on much of our team. We know we will be a smaller airline going forward. But we've worked to right size all aspects of the organization to that reality. Approximately [5,100] management and support staff positions were eliminated this summer, in a manner consistent with the CARES Act. And last week, we sent warn letters to 25,000 American Airlines frontline team members. We're doing everything we can to mitigate the impacts and by working with our union partners, we put forward new voluntary leave and early out programs for our frontline team. There's also an effort underway by our union partners to extend the current payroll support program into 2021. We're proud to support this union led initiative as we believe our entire industry has a shared goal of keeping hard working frontline team members [indiscernible]. With that, I’ll turn over to Derek who will give more detail on liquidity and cash burn. Derek.