Good to see you. Likewise. I'm going to drop a fan here. Thank you, sir. Staying on autopilot here, you got another one with United Airlines next. Very happy to welcome back to Laguna, CFO Mike Leskinen. Mike, welcome back. Thank you, Ravi. Absolutely. No 8-K from you guys, which is good. That's the standard. Can you give us an update on what you're seeing out there, and trends in 3K relative to expectations? It's a standard, I think, you know, not having 8-K. This business, a stable business, that is on a reasonable trajectory, you shouldn't have a lot of surprises. Yep. We're not quite there yet. This industry, I mean, I've never been more excited about the transformation that the industry is undergoing, and it's undergoing a transformation that's customer-led. Yep. Customers are choosing to fly on specific airlines because of the product, because of the clubs, because of the food, because of the loyalty programs. That's fundamentally different than in the past when customers were choosing based primarily on price and schedule. Price and schedule matters. Yep. Now so much more matters, and you're seeing a divergence in fortunes based on the airlines that have an industry that have a business model that's based on the customer. Yep. Giving the customer choice and giving the customer options, and those that had primarily focused on cost, is so fundamental to our path to double-digit margins. It is so fundamental to our path to an investment-grade credit rating. Yep. It is so fundamental to proving out the stability through a recession or whatever next cyclical event. Right. If we start going into an economic downturn at 12% margin and we lose five points, we're still mid to high single-digit margins with an investment-grade balance sheet with tens of billions of dollars on unencumbered asset. We will never dilute shareholders again by issuing equity in a crisis. That's what's going to lead to, I think, significant, significant multiple expansion for those players with a higher margin. You've seen it in the past. This is, you know, we need to prove it. We need to prove that margin. Never have I felt more confident about that path. I've been dreaming about this transformation for years and years, never have been more confident than this year because this year, despite the results that we put up, despite the results that Delta has put up, the rest of the industry is in a recession. We got hit starting right after the inauguration with a significant, significant decline in demand. Yep. That impacted us, no doubt. Newark has impacted us in an idiosyncratic way. Despite all of that, our margins have proven resilient. I'm really proud of that. The other players in the industry that are lower margin are pivoting. They're pivoting in a way where they are trying to invest in segmentation. They're trying to invest in ancillary products that will give the customer choice. They're 10 years behind those of us that have been investing in it. We talk about investing in clubs. It takes five to 10 years to build a club. It takes five to 10 years to think about changing the cabins on our aircraft. It takes five to 10 years to put seatback entertainment into our aircraft. We're not standing still. Starlink, I'm incredibly excited about. We invested $100 million over the last year in improving food on our airlines, on our aircraft. I hope all of you have experienced some of that. It makes a big difference. We're a commodity industry that is turning into a customer-centric industry where customers follow brand with brand loyalty. It's going to create strong, stable, double-digit margins and investment-grade balance sheet. I think there's a tremendous amount of alpha that will be generated for those of you that see that transformation early. Got it. Maybe we'll come back to the near-term trends in a second. Just to stay on that theme, to your point, the other airlines are trying to reinvent themselves. They are behind you, but they're also trying very hard to look like you. Do you think that, what impact do you think that rate of change will have on the industry? Meaning, do you think it's good for all of them to look more like you and that is a rising tide of rhythm for everybody? Do you think that that's potential competition where they can say, hey, I have a new plane and I have a new cabin, so come to me instead of flying United? How do you think that plays out? I think there's only space for a very small number of differentiated brand-loyal airlines at the top of the industry. I think there's only so much space for that. I do think that there is a very important role for cost-focused airlines to play in smaller and mid-sized cities, leisure destinations like Orlando and Las Vegas. There will always be a place for those types of airlines. It's just smaller than what it has historically been, as more and more of the population in the U.S. has a preference for the products and services that we're offering. Make no mistake, this is not something that like United has done or Delta has done. This is something that the customers are choosing. This is about customer choice. It's just transformational. Got it. What do you think this industry looks like in 10 years? Are we going to have three mainline carriers, three regional carriers, and three ULCCs? Do you think it looks fundamentally different? I think probably in five years, I'll go even sooner than 10. I think in five years, you're going to have a couple, maybe a few, but probably a couple players at the top that have tremendous brand loyalty. You have maybe a player or two in the middle where they're serving mid and small-sized cities. You're going to have a constant churn of airlines that are low cost, that are serving smaller cities and in a point-to-point model place for that. I think that's probably where the industry stabilizes. It'll be a much healthier industry, frankly, for everyone. Got it. Speaking of healthier industry, again, I will give you guys all the credit in the world for first going out and publicly saying that there are people who are losing money flying, and that's not sustainable, and that's going to end badly. Here we are. Given that the industry has now picked up that baton and they are cutting back on that unprofitable flying, do you think them shrinking is good for the industry overall? Have you seen enough at this point? For For all the change this industry has embraced, we've had last year and this year two pockets where there's been too much capacity and the industry has had to take a bunch of it out. Has it now got to a point where this is sustainable going forward? You know, I'm not going to take the bait on talking about others' plans. What I will say, having come from an investment management background, return on invested capital matters. Yep. Delivering on your financial targets matters. I think we're approaching a period where that enforces financial discipline on the industry. If you are earning a lot of money in some of your southern hubs and the margins are strong, fantastic. If you're losing money in hubs consistently year after year after year, that's not going to work. I think shareholders are going to increasingly hold leadership teams accountable, as they should, to deliver on financial metrics. I think that's what's healthy around it. It's healthy because not everyone has been dealt the same set of cards. If you have spent a decade or more building out a customer-friendly model, you can't fix that overnight. That's what I think is going to determine the winners and losers. I think it already has. I think that the investment community is starting to realize that. I still think we're early innings. I think we're in inning three of that transformation for this industry. I think it's going to be really healthy. We've seen it in other industries. Yep. We've seen it in the hotel industry, the cruise line industry, I think, are good analogs. They're not perfect analogs. That's happening in the airlines now. Got it. You mentioned in your early remarks, the path to double-digit pre-tax margins. Can you just give us the kind of big building blocks to get there, right? How much of that is building on this premium product? How much of it is share gain? How much of it is United Next and the new aircraft? How much of it is potentially cost takeout? What are the big chunks there? Yeah. Look, I think most of it's customer-led. It's customers. The demand profile that we see in the premium cabins, in international cabins, even in the main cabin, it seems to be different than the demand profile that some of the lower margin airlines are seeing. It is fundamentally different. You can see it in the way we're all behaving. You can see it in what we're saying at conferences. You can see it in the results. You're going to see it in the 3Q results. You're going to see it in the 4Q results. I think that that's foundational to it. We're going to have a revenue, a unit revenue advantage that only widens because customers are choosing it. On top of that, I think we've been really disciplined. I'm really proud of the finance team at United Airlines right now for what we've done on a cost front this year and what has been a recessionary year. We brought our cost down significantly relative to what I thought back in January. Our procurement team has been restructured. We got a new leader, Bob Rye out of RTX. That's been fantastic. He's off to a running start. He's got some key lieutenants that are doing a great job being smarter about structuring our contracts. We're the largest airline in the world. We should get the best pricing in the world. Yep. We increasingly are. That's been a big tailwind. We've got opportunities to run a more efficient tech ops organization. The team is doing a great job there. It is synergistic with an improved procurement department. There is some real, I think, relatively low-hanging fruit on the cost front that we're going after at United Airlines. I'm really, really proud of that. That has definitely helped 2025 relative to what I thought at the beginning of the year. As we look at 2026 and 2027, I think some of that actually gained momentum. We've got some nice tailwinds on the cost front. In addition to that, we have gauge benefit. As Boeing starts to produce more aircraft, especially MAX 9s and 10s, it's going to help us accelerate our gauge story. That is going to be idiosyncratic for United for two or three years at least. I'm really excited about that giving us a nice relative tailwind. I think we've got a nice cost tailwind. We've got a structurally transformed industry that's driving strong unit revenues. Andrew Nocella and his team, Patrick Quayle, have done an absolutely incredible job driving the network in a way where this connectivity just feeds on itself. I think that you're going to see it come from both. I'm not going to give an idea of is it 50/50. I don't know. It is both that drive our margin expansion into that double-digit range. Got it. On that platform, let's talk about near-term trends and kind of how the quarter is shaping up. Obviously, we've heard already from a number of airlines that July was a tricky month for a number of reasons. There does appear to have been an improving trend in August, September, going into October. What are you seeing so far related to that? The strong trends we talked about on our Q2 conference call have absolutely continued. I feel great about it. It was like a light switch late July, early August. We're seeing it across segments, across industries, really strong. I do agree with comments from some of our competitors that the corporate recovery is leading, really good. Fourth quarter international, I think, is going to be really strong. Third quarter, I think we're still working through matching supply with demand at the industry level. There's some work to do for next year via tailwind. Really strong. In fact, one stat from my team, we were just going through most recent bookings. If you look at the out bookings, two months and more out since Labor Day, it's been double-digit improvement year on year. We just feel really emboldened. That's a short trend. The bookings are really strong, particularly corporate going into the fourth quarter. I will remind everyone that, you know, for second and third quarter, we had an issue with Newark. Yep. We booked some tickets at lower yields. We'll see that in the third quarter. It's what I expected when we set the guidance in August. Everything feels really, really good. I want to remind everyone about that idiosyncratic difference for the third quarter. The fourth quarter looks fantastic. As we look for the setup into 2026, based on what we're seeing in bookings, really, really emboldened. Got it. That's really encouraging to hear. I told Delta as well, I'm a little bit surprised to hear the tone from all of you guys on corporate travel, just given that the general view is that corporate America is somewhat on the cusp of recession. Now, attendance is up 50% here at the Laguna Conference. Beyond that, do you have a sense of what's driving that? Is it actual optimism on the corporate side for 2026? Is it pent-up travel from what they didn't do in the first half of the year? What's driving that bounce? I think it's simple, Ravi. Corporate is the segment that hasn't fully recovered since the pandemic. OK. I look around this full room. I look around the conference. I think this is the top attendance. It is absolutely. Business travel is coming back, and I think that there's more to come. I mean, we're not counting on it, but I think it's more to come. I think it makes sense relative to the levels we saw pre-pandemic that we still have some more catch-up there. Got it. Let's talk about Newark. Obviously, kind of unfortunate disruption there. You said trending towards the 0.9% drag that you had expected in 3Q so far. How is the Newark resolution? There seems to be some ongoing developments there, kind of trending versus your expectations. I tell you, we couldn't be more grateful for the administration and Sean Duffy and the team and what they're doing to drive more resiliency and stability into the system, particularly in the Northeast and Newark. It's been tremendous. 72 operations per hour. I don't know if it stays at 72. It goes a little bit higher. It's foundational to run the airport at a level of capacity that the airport can handle on blue-sky days. I think we finally have found that unlock. OK. It will create a much, much more reliable hub, a hub that you can count on for connectivity. I think it's going to improve profitability. We built lots of buffers into the system to try to make it more recoverable during irregular operations. Right. If we can fix the overall throughput to balance supply and demand and with the physical capability the airport is, you can kind of take some of that out. I think we'll see. We talk about the path to double-digit margins. One element to that that maybe is underappreciated is just how much improvement we can see at Newark. I'm very excited about the future. In fact, if you look at the operational results at Newark versus LaGuardia and versus JFK, really proud of the results at Newark since we brought the operations down to 72 operations. It's really right in the hunt when historically it hasn't been. Got it. You said in the past that you've been a big proponent of reducing the flight rate at Newark and kind of capping that capacity. Now you have got that. Can you remind us again kind of who makes the decision on how many departures there are going to be and what factors they're looking at while they make that decision? It's a government decision. Yep. It is across agencies and groups to make that decision. We have input, but we don't get to make that decision. It is really just simple math. You've got two parallel runways. How many can you fly on a Blue Sky day? You shouldn't schedule more than that. That is where we are now. Got it. Just to confirm, any book away, any weak rhythm that you saw from incentivizing people to come back to Newark in 3Q, that is behind you in 3Q and from 4Q onwards? It'll be almost fully behind us in 4Q. OK. There's probably still a few corporate customers that have still maybe pushed a little bit of their flights out of JFK. OK. From the disclosures you see, you wouldn't be able to see it. We're still fighting to get a little bit of that back. Really excited about what's happening there. Got it. Any other noisy items to think of in the third quarter? I think a couple of airlines have flagged July weather being disruptive from an IRA perspective. I think you guys had a tech outage very briefly for like a few hours at one point in 3Q. Anything else to keep in mind? We had a brief tech outage. We're working on getting off mainframes. We've got some systems that are on mainframes still and trying to get that all up in the cloud. You will see less and less of that. I'm proud of the team for recovering quickly. That's not going to impact any of our results. I want to make sure we provide a better customer experience. We have to get better at that. Outside of Newark, cost controls are really fantastic right now. I'm proud of the team on that front. Revenues are strong, and bookings are very, very encouraging. Got it. Any further color on international? I think another carrier was saying earlier that they're seeing some weakness in international. One is they're seeing some weakness in international, particularly main cabin. They're also seeing what they think is a structural change of seasonality where July and August are maybe not as peaky as they were before. September and October are picking up. Would you endorse both those views? Yeah, let me try to put myself in their shoes a little bit. I mean, I wouldn't characterize it the way they did. OK. Personally, I would say there's strength across all channels, across all segments. International and corporate in particular, as you look at the fourth quarter, feel stronger than main cabin. There's strength in both. I do think that at an industry level, we need to do more at United to understand some of the seasonal patterns and how they may be a little bit different than they were pre-pandemic. OK. October being a little bit more peaky, and how do we level that out a little bit more? That's an opportunity for next year. Nothing in the booking pattern is concerning. One thing I will highlight, I guess, around you didn't ask, but on the cargo front, the expiration of the de minimis rule. Oh, right. I've been kind of hounding my team, like, what's this mean for our cargo forecast? We got a lot of tailwinds that I think are going to offset any weakness around the de minimis rule. Even that, upon spending a little bit more time digging into the forecast, I'm not overly concerned about. Understood. Just to your point on the you guys need to do more work internally on the seasonality, I asked Delta this as well. Is that purely an international thing? Or do you think domestic seasonality is also changing? I think back to school now looks very different than pre-pandemic. The way people travel, peak and trough may have changed as well. Is it largely international? I think for us, it's been a little bit more international than domestic. That's a good question for my colleague Andrew Nocella in a separate meeting. Fair enough. Maybe just switching gears a little bit and kind of talking about how you guys have got past the Newark disruption. Another way to do that is by opening a new front. You have done that with JetBlue and the Blue Sky partnership, kind of with access to JFK. Can you just talk through what benefits that partnership brings to you guys? Kind of, why did you think it was important to get into it at this moment? I'm going to take it back to the transformation in the industry where you've got airlines that are customer-centric and airlines that have been more cost-focused. JetBlue, their DNA has always been about a differentiated customer experience. The DNA of the two airlines just fits together really well in that respect. I think that team has been dealt a difficult hand. They're making really, really smart decisions with the hand they've been dealt. I think the Blue Sky deal is just a win-win for customers. That's where it starts. It's going to give customers more choice, the ability to kind of live between the loyalty programs. I think it's fantastic for both JetBlue and United's customers and shareholders. Really excited about that. It's synergistic. They also have, by the way, I think a really good platform to sell hotel and rental car. Yep. We had a system that needed some improvement. I'm excited about working with JetBlue in that respect as well to drive some additional ancillary sales. Got it. Remind us again of the timing of the maybe JFK access benefit for you guys and when that shows up in the numbers. That's going to take at least a few months. Sure. Let me get back to you on that, Ravi. Understood. On Paisley, you guys have led with tech investments, obviously Starlink you mentioned earlier. Can you talk about was that maybe a little bit of a blind spot for you guys, the investment in the ancillary revenue opportunities? Is there any way to quantify what that Paisley access will give you guys? We have some internal ideas. I'm not ready to share externally. OK. I don't think it's a blind spot. I think it's something that we've been working on. I'm excited to see what Paisley can do for us. Got it. You feel like this is a maxed-out relationship? You don't feel like there is a need to get closer maybe at some point? The enterprise value of JetBlue is pretty expensive. They've got a lot of debt. I love what the team's doing with a lot of respect for them. Blue Sky is our path to partnership. That's it. Got it. We've had a lot of conversation about premium products here. You guys kind of have your own cabin refresh. Polaris Studio Suite is launching later this year. Can you talk about how much room there is at the top to make that product even more high-end and maybe monetize that? I think if you look at the first-class seats, the most premium seats, and the amount of customers that are flying from the United States to see the world versus the amount of customers that are coming in, this is an area where U.S. carriers have lagged. There is a real opportunity and real demand for us to provide a product there. We need to do it in a cost-conscious way. There is tremendous opportunity for that, for a more premium product. We are doing it thoughtfully, and we are going to roll it out thoughtfully. Segmentation, providing, I think the lesson here is that the more choice you provide for the customer, the more differentiated you can make the experience on United Airlines, the more successful we are going to be. Stay tuned. We are not done. I know we have teased about this rollout. I think you are going to see more and more segmentation as time goes on. I do not know where the natural end is. Got it. One of your peers did almost unbundle the premium fare to a certain extent. Do you see any kind of rationale in doing that? We need to see how that plays out. I think there's some good logic behind it. OK. We are going to give customers what they want. Understood. Any questions from the audience? One up here. Could you just talk a little bit about how you see some of these new AI tools changing how to make that enhance the customer experience? That's where I'm focused on with AI tools, by the way, is how can we do a better job using AI to recover from irregular operations? I think that's an area where it's going to be really well suited. How can we use AI to help rebook customers during irregular operations more quickly? How can we use AI in customer service to help give customers the right reaccommodation and to figure that out faster? Maybe to put it in the app so they can do it even without calling our customer service center. I think there'll be some very interesting AI opportunities we're starting to look into. We're undergoing a finance transformation as a lot of corporates are doing it, is how we can be more thoughtful about running scenarios. How can we be more thoughtful about budgeting and forecasting using some of these tools? We're starting to scratch that as well. I think the first place is how do we use AI for irregular operations and customer reaccommodation? Any other questions? Hey, Mike. Could you talk a little bit about United Next and the build-out of your mid-con super hubs, where you sit with gates, connectivity, the upgauge opportunity? I think it is the unique opportunity. I mean, we announced it back in 2018. It is the unique opportunity that United has. Because if you look at the other large legacy carriers, hub and spoke, they have created these hubs with connectivity that drives a lot of customer options that we haven't. We've been on that path. We've done some of it with regional jets because we haven't been able to get the aircraft. Now as Boeing is starting to ramp production on the Max aircraft, I think you're going to see a reacceleration of that connectivity growth in O'Hare. I think you're going to see it in Denver. You're seeing it in Houston. You're going to see upgauging. You will be using more mainline aircraft. We have a better selection of seats than on a regional jet. You're going to see more and more of that at those three hubs in particular. It's going to create tremendous customer value. Okay. You are very active in the investing space with some of these supersonic eVTOL companies. I'm just curious if there's an update there and kind of what you're seeing and if there's any opportunities you're excited about right now. Thanks. Ventures. Yeah, I love it. This industry is an industry that for 30 years, it's been about how do you drive the cheapest cost. There's not been a lot of innovation. It's an industry where there should be a lot more innovation. eVTOL, my conviction that eVTOL is going to change the way we work and live. The timing, I'm not going to prognosticate on too much. Sometime soon, we're seeing Joby's aircraft to Archer's aircraft. I went out and witnessed the Midnight aircraft for a test flight just a few weeks ago. It is so quiet. My wife's hairdryer is louder than this aircraft. We had a Cessna flying at 2,000, 3,000 feet above the airfield, and it drowned out the aircraft, the noise from the Midnight. That aircraft is going to be quiet, no carbon footprint, cost-effective because it's electric engines. It's going to be, I think, really fantastic. It's going to take mostly cars off the road, not compete with aircraft. Supersonic, there's a real demand for supersonic across the North Atlantic for sure. The economics of that are tougher. Blake Scholl at Boom has done some amazing things to drive that forward. We're excited about it. There's no question. It would be a product our customers, if we can deliver it to them at the right price, would be very, very excited about. The economics are a little bit tougher there. I'll tell you an area that we're looking at more recently that I'm excited about. That is how AI intersects with booking trips and how you plan for a trip. I think there's something really exciting about allowing many of our 100,000+ plus employees to share experiences about their trips, make recommendations about restaurants or recommendations around hotels, and to feed that in a thoughtful way based on what we know about a customer from AI. I think there's some unlock there. We're spending some more time to provide some more thoughtful, curated distribution options. I think that's an area that we're spending more time on now. I think overall, having a venture team, we got to be very thoughtful and disciplined around what we invest. I think you've seen that out of United Airlines. We're making relatively small checks, but making sure that it educates the larger parents so that we're at the cutting edge of innovation. I think that's something that this industry has been missing. I'm really proud that United is leading the way there. Mike, is there a world where you guys might partner with some of the bigger LLM platforms just to make sure that, A, you have the data and, B, like if I think anyone under the age of 30 now just goes to a chatbot and says, like, book me a, plan me a vacation or give me the itinerary, right? How do you be a part of that? There are a number of investments we've already made within United Ventures that are scratching that itch precisely. I don't know exactly where it lands. Part of Ventures is some of the investments are going to work, some are going to fail. Absolutely. We have a half dozen that are going after LLMs and what we can use. One area where we are exploring, and I won't name the company, is using voice recognition for very loud environments in tech ops with very specific language and keywords. You can't just use something off the shelf. Sure. To help technicians diagnose the problems and be more efficient around how we repair aircraft and engines, I think that's going to create some efficiencies in how we run our tech ops. Got it. Maybe switching gears a little bit, you guys have also been sort of leaders in the space in talking about the value that is in the loyalty program and the co-brand card. Obviously, you monetized that during the pandemic. You have sort of teased that you have more levers that you can pull there. Can you just talk about what the potential optionalities are and what the catalysts will be to get you to pull those levers? Let me say we've been leaders in trying to drive shareholder value creation. OK. Given my background, I've been very focused on that from the very beginning, which is how do we create shareholder value in an industry that historically hasn't, in an industry where we're still trading at single-digit multiples. Within that business of United Airlines, we've got a very large segment that, forget about the transformation I've just described to all of you, has had stable and relatively rapidly growing margin and profitability for the last decade. That's going to continue, I think, only accelerate into the next. We haven't talked about it enough. Absent the transformation, it's like, what can you do to help that help accelerate the value that we can bring to shareholders? As the industry transforms, though, and we get to double-digit margins, as we get to investment-grade multiple, as we prove the resiliency of the model, I think we get to a mid-teens multiple anyways. Yep. If we do that, the urgency to do any transaction with the loyalty program goes away. Sure. Any transaction, what doesn't go away is transparency. True. I think anyone in the room that wants to do a sum of the parts model and to understand the stability that I'm preaching about and to understand that it's growing at a double-digit rate and that the margins are tremendous and that the free cash characteristics are tremendous, we owe that transparency to investors. I'm working very hard. My team's working very hard to provide some segment disclosure. I hope to get that out next year. I'm not going to promise that. I've been talking about that for some time. We're marching to try to get segment disclosure out next year. I think it'll matter to some investors. It won't matter to others. I think it will be an added element that drives our multiple higher as we earn it. I'm not going to sit here and preach about the multiple. You guys get to decide what the multiple happens, I think. As we deliver on the financial results, I think that that will naturally occur. Understood. Do you just want to close this out by just talking about the balance sheet and kind of the optionality there? Our balance sheet's never been in a better spot. We're doing a balance of secured borrowing, and we're doing some sale leaseback, all at very attractive rates. I'm really pleased. That's the present. How do we optimize our cost of borrowing as the business improves? As we roll into 2026, I think that our margin expands, and the margin expansion is the primary driver of an upgrade to investment grade. Maybe that's late in the year, maybe that's in 2027. The timing, I'm not going to prognosticate too much. As we do that, I'd much rather borrow it in an unsecured manner, unencumber all of the assets that we have at United Airlines. I think that's the right model for the leader in the industry. That will bolster our resiliency if an asteroid ever hits again, where we'll have a lot of options. I think Delta did a really admirable job going into the pandemic and building that stronger balance sheet. I think we're going to do that. We're well on that path. Yep. I think we're just, you know, we need another 12 months or so to prove it out. That will also contribute to the value creation for our equity shareholders. Got it. Mike, the quality of the story is very clear. We just need the environment to cooperate a little bit. We shall wait and watch. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.