Will Heyburn: Sure, I let me take that. On the passenger side, we are now in the three largest vertical transportation markets in the world. Northeast U.S., Southern Europe, in Canada. Then obviously we have a small joint venture in India. So until electric vertical aircraft are here and we have more landing zones, I can’t tell you we see anything compelling yet on the passenger side. And I think there’s so much addressable market in each of our passenger verticals where they are, as I said, the three most important, largest opportunities and markets that are today, that our best use of time and money is making sure that we kind of build those into what they can be with expanded routes on a profitable basis. So the number one area that I see and we see as a company in terms of M&A is on leveraging our medical business.
And that could be horizontal expansion in the existing medical business like you see with TOPS, which I think is going to give us a hell of a lot more firepower in terms of offering a compelling offering to our hospital clients and being able to maintain and extend those relationships going forward. But also, as will mentioned, critical cargo. You could be radioisotopes. We could move into other aspects of the organ business. We’re not in kidneys yet, that next slide out, but a lot of religious services could be useful to that. So clearly, when you’re moving as many pieces of critical particle 24-hours a day, there are other things to move and things are moving fast and people want things now. There’s parts that need to be sent on demand for machinery, for even aviation itself.
So we’re seeing those opportunities every day. Some of them are bite size, some of them are in size, but we clearly have the balance sheet to do those and to do those quickly and without necessarily any type of incremental debt.
Bill Peterson: Okay, thanks for all the insights.
Will Heyburn: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. One moment please, for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Itay Michaeli with Citi.
Itay Michaeli: Great, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just a couple of questions. First, maybe a few financials. Will, I think you mentioned for metamobility an outlook for 20 plus percent flight margin. I think it’s a little bit better than what we talked about in the past around mid teens. I’m hoping you can talk a bit more about that. And then secondly, I was hoping you could quantify the drag from Europe on flight margins this quarter as well.
Will Heyburn: Great question. As you know, on the medical side, it’s really all about more reliance on those dedicated aircraft. When we grow really quickly, like we’ve been growing, we’ll be servicing a significant amount of our demand through the charter market. Then what we do is, behind those contracts with hospitals, we’ll dedicate supply that’s located in the right locations to eliminate repositioning. And that’s how we can. You’ve seen those flight margins creep up quarter-by-quarter, and that’s how ultimately we can start to get above that 20% level. And the other thing that we talked about in the past is bringing in dedicated vehicles. We use a lot of third party grounds when we’re growing quickly, but we have so much scale in a lot of markets now, it can be a lot more efficient, a better service we can provide and at a lower cost to our customers if we go ahead and buy our own lights and sirens, SUVs, and then provide that ground transportation ourselves, and then that gets us to kind of 30% plus flight profit margins on the ground portion.
So there’s a lot of different levers that we can pull and TOPS once we get to scale, which we talked about kind of covering our initial fixed cost with the first two customers that are launching in December, but getting to average medical flight margins in the full year 2024, that’s going to pull up our margins a little bit as well, too, once we get to scale there. So a lot of different things that are helping us get to those good, solid margins. And then you see our overall SG&A in that business not growing nearly as quickly. So you’re getting that operating leverage. Does that answer your question on that?
Itay Michaeli: Yes, perfect. Maybe the flight margin drag from Europe this quarter, I don’t know if you can quantify that.
Rob Wiesenthal: So Europe actually has a little bit better flight profit margins than sort of the corporate average. It’s a good guy on that front, where it was a little bit disappointing for us was just on the overall cost side. We’ve talked about this. There were three different businesses that needed to be integrated for a lot of reasons. We decided to be more cautious on that integration process, which increased our cost. So that was really the disappointment. We’re not going to go into sort of specific numbers on a region in terms of EBITDA contribution, but we’re really on the right path there in terms of right sizing the cost structure and right sizing the fleet availability for the opportunity.
Will Heyburn: Yes, I think I would say just add on to that, when you think about generally your cost per seat and your cost of aircraft, the fact that that is one of the best margins in our Passenger segment. The cost side is a lot easier to manage than improving your flight margins in terms of just what you charge versus the cost of the aircraft. The cost of the aircraft that’s a very difficult thing to kind of get down. In terms of kind of the cost below that line integration and common shared services that’s something that’s a much easier lift. So we’re definitely optimistic looking forward with that business for 2024.
Itay Michaeli: That’s very clear and helpful. If I could just sneak in one last question on Blade Airport. The momentum you’re seeing, including thus far in Q4 for the seat growth, I’m just curious. One, do you think you’re taking share from rideshare? And second, just maybe just talk about like repeat flyers and kind of what you’re seeing there in terms of that incremental momentum you’re seeing?
