Delta Air Lines, Inc. (NYSE:DAL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Robert Silk: Yeah. Hi. When you talk about getting back to full pre-pandemic capacity in your major hubs, are you talking about seats or flight numbers? And then what percent of your gauge up, let’s say, in Atlanta, what will it be up this summer and how do you think about managing crowds as you increase gauge and bring your flight numbers back up to where they were or beyond?

Glen Hauenstein: Right. We will probably not, for the next couple of years see the flight numbers we did in 2019. We will get seat capacity restoration to 100%, which means that gauge will go up significantly. When you look at our fleet evolution that was always our plan was to continue to grow not by additional departures but by larger airplanes, more efficiency, less fuel burn, better products and services and so that’s really what we are intending on doing. The pandemic accelerated that and so you have got our average gauge up by double digits right now. That’s partly because we keep taking larger airplanes partly because the regional fleets are less restored.

Robert Silk: Yeah.

Glen Hauenstein: And we think that will normalize out over the next 18 months, but we will probably not for the foreseeable future get back to the flight levels, although we will match or exceed by the end of the year at the historic levels in terms of seat capacity.

Robert Silk: Is there any with the higher gauge, do you end up with more crowded banks in terms of number of passengers or is that a stage by having less flights

Glen Hauenstein: No. I think

Robert Silk: if you have more crack

Glen Hauenstein: that’s why we have done these generational builds across our network is that, we knew that bigger gauge was coming, we needed to accommodate it and even for example, here in Atlanta, we have worked closely with the city to reconfigure the deconcourse to be wider than any of the other concourses to accommodate that increased gauge. So we have got short-, medium- and long-term plans to accommodate those gauges. But a lot of that was in our generational builds across the network and we don’t think that it’s going to be more crowded than it was in 2019 or feel more crowded.

Robert Silk: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. Thank you, Glen.

Ed Bastian: Thank you, Robert. Matt that will wrap our call for today. We are grateful for everyone’s time and participation.

Operator: That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation today.