Gary Kelly
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
That's a great question, Bill, and a very fair one. I don't have a bright line to give you today. Except for fuel, again, we have a great outlook for 2011. And obvious to everyone, of course, that's the big issue. And I felt that for some time, and that's what everybody is saying and no doubt what you're thinking. I would say this. Where the futures market is today, I'm not suggesting that we are comfortable. That's probably not the right word, but we're not shocked by it, and I think we are well prepared to absorb that level of fuel price, fuel cost and still sustain our plan for 2011. If it goes up to $150, I think that that's pretty clear that that's on the other side of what would be a good business plan here in the near term. So we're not expecting that, that would happen. So obviously, somewhere south of there is a point that we would need to be slowing our growth. We're published through August. So every schedule that we publish, we talk about this very thing, and we don't go out for a year with our schedules. So I think that, that provides us more of a natural hedge, Bill, than our counterparts who typically I think publish 330 days out. So I don't have an answer specifically, but we have a solid year in terms of our outlook with the current fuel. We've got a three-pronged approach to manage it, which is with our hedge, with continuing focus on conserving fuel and then finally, with revenue offsets. And I think Laura and I have both tried hard here this morning, I guess now this afternoon, to illustrate how strong our revenue momentum is. And so at least for now, I think we're very comfortable with our plan which fuel prices were lower. But we'll see a nice offset to fuel price increases from here with our hedge that's in place. And the hedge, of course, is pretty substantial, as you know, by the schedule and by following us. It's pretty substantial through 2014. So we'll have ample. That's what it's for. We'd have ample time to adjust. If we need to slow down our growth, we have a lot of airplanes that we could retire. So I think we're in good shape on all those folks.