Global Crossing Airlines Group Inc. (PNK:JETMF) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Global Crossing Airlines Group Inc. (PNK:JETMF) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 13, 2023

Grant Howard: Okay. We are going to start. Thank you to everybody who’s attending today. There’s still more being admitted into the room. There’s a lot to talk about, and we always get a lot of Q&A on this. So I’m going to dive right into – or let – sorry, let the Chairman and CEO, Ed Wegel dive right into it and Ryan Goepel, CFO, to talk about the first quarter results and an outlook for 2023. With that, Ed and Ryan.

Ed Wegel: Great. Thank you, Grant, and thanks to everyone who is joining our call today. We appreciate your interest and your support, and I hope that we’ll be able to give you a good presentation. Today, as you know, we reported our first quarter earnings. And first, I would like to say thank you to our 436 team members for their great work in this quarter, during which we received our cargo certification and started cargo operations, while battling some uncontrollable events in January and February. And as we battle through those, we delivered a record revenue result in March of this quarter. We will get into the events, the uncontrollable events and how we dealt with those later in our presentation. But I will say this, given the progress we made in the first quarter in building the platform and setting up the company for a huge second half of this year, Q1 was a very, very good quarter for us.

And in the process, we are building a very resilient and resourceful workforce that can ensure our airline operates safely and efficiently every day. I want to talk first, before we get into the presentation, about our approach to this business. It is important for investors to understand how we think about our airline and our short- and long-term planning. We have gotten to where we are. Today, 9 passenger aircraft soon to be 10 and 1 A321 freighter aircraft soon to be 2 with full 121 flag certification with every other certification available to us except ETOPS, which we are on track to receive in November this year. We can operate this airline now worldwide. We have done this with $28 million of capital, with $7 million of that $28 million in cash deposits on our balance sheet.

We have minimized shareholder dilution, we have been extremely careful how we raise money, and we have used the money we do have to continually invest in this business. In my view, this Board and this management team have done an exceptional job building this platform for minimal dollars and minimal dilution. And we have done this in a very uncertain economic and geopolitical environment. We went through the end stages of COVID and Omicron. This is after certifying this airline through the very bad days of COVID. Rising interest rates, inflation, rising oil prices, war in Eastern Europe, falling cargo demand, combined with an intense work with talent, particularly with pilots. We are constantly juggling a number of forces, which impact our business and impacts the pace of aircraft deliveries.

Having said that since certification, we have taken delivery of an aircraft once every 2.5 months, once every 2.5 months, that’s pretty darn good. To take delivery of an aircraft requires months of planning. It also requires having trained crews, cockpit crews, cabin crews, cash for deposits and for the conformity of the aircraft. It is an intensive choreographed effort to put an aircraft on a US 121 certificate. And for us to be at 10 and soon 12 aircraft on our certificate, including freighters, is a remarkable achievement. And we have been planning ongoing for the rest of our aircraft deliveries this year, subject, of course, to the DOT and FAA approvals. So what is our approach to this business? It’s important for you to understand how we view this.

So let’s get to the first slide. This is our approach to the business. We take a long-term view of this business. Many charter airlines want to get to 5 or 6 airplanes and think that they can just make money for the next 30 years. That is a not sustainable approach, and we have seen many charter airlines go out of business because of that. We take a long-term view. We are going to build a durable, sustainable and long-term profitable U.S. charter airline. We continually reinvest in the business. We are undercapitalized, for sure. But we take the dollars that we have and every dollar goes back into the business. We’re adding aircraft, both passenger and private aircraft. We’re hiring and training pilots, and we’ll get into the number of pilots that we’ve been able to hire and train over the last few quarters, it’s quite remarkable.

And we use information technology to its full capabilities to move towards total paperless airline. We integrate ground handling and fueling to better control our products. We invest in our ground handling operations, and we see diversified revenue streams to reduce our overall risk. Again, let me stress, we take a long-term view of this business. We are in this for the long haul. We are building a platform. We are investing in our business. We are making sure that we’ve got a platform that’s scalable and can take additional aircraft, both passenger and cargo aircraft that we can ramp up our people and our infrastructure in a way that is sustainable, and we can do within our budget requirements. That’s our view of the business. And I think if anyone believes that we should take a different approach, then this investment may not be for you.

So Q1 is a reflection of our approach. Cargo, after 2 years of planning, and we started cargo planning pretty soon after we started the certification process on the passenger side, but we knew because of the long planning time that’s required to operate cargo airplanes as well as get those cargo airplanes under LOI and under lease that we have to start early. So we tied up 15 A321 freighters even before we were certified as a US 121 airline. Certification happened in the first quarter of this year, and we received our first airplane, and that airplane is now operating and operated for 21 days in Q1. Tremendous amount of effort, sweat, tears and cash to do that, but we invested in this business, and this now is going to be one of the main drivers of our growth in the years to come.

Cuba. Big important part of our strategy is to be the dominant charter operator to Cuba. We are now in that position. We’ve laid a strong foundation. We brought the three largest tour operators to Cuba. We dominate that sector, and it’s a good foundation of revenue for us each one. Pilots. We invest in pay and benefits to reduce attrition, along with intense focus on recruitment and training. We did a tremendous amount of that, and we’ll get to a slide where we show how many pilots we have been able to recruit and train and retain which is the most important of those 3 words as we move forward. Infrastructure. We’re building our IT systems, but as well, we’re building a great team of dispatchers, crew schedulers, flight attendance, finance, other team members within this organization.

It’s important to have each one of those teams operating. And as we like to say, we are a team of teams, and we’ve built the infrastructure for a sustainable platform that we can grow and scale and be sustainably profitable and our certifications in the first quarter, culminating 18 to 24 months of work. We received our DoD, Department of Defense approvals. We received our IOSA certification for – which allows us to operate for other airlines, and we received our EASA certification, which allows us to operate within and within Europe, which is very critical as part of our business plan as we move forward. We have started ETOPS certification in Q1, and we expect to receive our certification sometime in Q4 of this year, that will allow us to fly the North Atlantic as well as to Hawaii and other destinations in the Pacific once we have that certification.

So commentary on Q1. Traditionally, the slowest quarter in commercial aviation, every major airline and most of the ULCCs lost money in the first quarter. We are different than the scheduled airline, and there are some different elements of our first quarter that impacted our profitability, which we’ll talk about. But we had some significant scheduled maintenance during Q1 as a result of the leases that we put in place. We’ve got tremendous lease benefits because of the scheduled maintenance that was scheduled as part of our acquisition of those aircraft, but we had to endure that during the first quarter. We got through that, but it effectively reduced our fleet by 2 aircraft. We knew that going in and we had planned for, but that allows us now to be relatively heavy maintenance-free for the balance of the year.

We accelerated hiring and training of pilots and flight attendants to allow us to execute what is a robust sold out summer schedule, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. As mentioned, we added two major tour operators to our Cuba operation effective of March 1. This gives us a stable long-term cash flow, $3 million from those two major tour operators with the third operator, we’re up well over $4 million per month, which is a great foundation of revenue for us as we move forward. As I said, we finalized and received our key certifications DoD, IOSA and our TCO for the EASA. We signed LOIs for 2 additional A320 passenger aircraft, and we had a deferral of the major U.S. government contract that we had planned for, which we have started to fly in December of last year.

And because of some issues within the U.S. government about how they were treating transborder issues on the Southern border, this contract had to be deferred. Now, we are starting to pick up that work here in May, and that will continue for the balance of the year. We will eventually pick up all of that revenue again, but it impacted Q1 outside of our control, we work with our major clients, the U.S. government to mitigate that. We were able to get some other contracts in place quickly to sort of mitigate that, but we didn’t go as far as possible in order to get to a breakeven in Q1. Had we had that major contract and had we had a few less issues on getting our aircraft out of scheduled maintenance, our Q1 would have been breakeven or slightly positive.

Let me say that again. After 2 issues outside of our control, both of which now, we believe, will be to our benefit as we move forward, we would have been breakeven in Q1 as we had predicted as well we had invested in the business in terms of cargo and aircraft and systems and people. And so in my view, again, Q1 was a huge success for us. I’ll ask Ryan to go – start going through some of our metrics.

Ryan Goepel: So one of the key elements that we talk about is we’re more than just an airline – many people categorize this as an airline. We’re trying to position ourselves more as a service company and as a service company we sell block hours. Now our metric, our key metric is how many block hours and a block hour for those who don’t know, is when an aircraft pushes back in the date, the blocks come off and then the aircraft gets pushed back the date, the blocks go on. It’s right time for taxes. But the number of block hours per month is a key metric to track. The other key metric we track is how many block hours we fly per aircraft per month. Both of these, as you can see, have had double- if not triple-digit growth since March of last year, and we’re continuing to see that trend going into the summer.

Our key element in order to fly this aircraft performing the block hours is our pilot pool. As you can see, our pilot pool has grown from 65 to 85 – or 60 to 85 over the course of the quarter, a 41% increase. We also allude to I guess a minute later slide, we’ve continued that hiring into Q2, and we’ll give you an update on that and again, the net aircraft days per month. As you can see, despite our block hours growing at 110%, our net aircraft days have only grown by 35%, which means we’re utilizing the existing assets more effectively and more efficiently and bodes well for what we consider our growth plan going forward. Looking at the Q1 ‘22 results. $32.2 million of revenue, which is our best revenue month – our best revenue quarter, sorry, adjusted EBITDAR of $2.5 million and adjusted EBITDA of $2.9 million.

The key adjustments we put in to factor in is $500,000 per share-based comp and $1.4 million for private training and $240,000 worth in cash lease accounting adjustment. What I think this reflects is our ability to start delivering profit and how close we are to becoming a profitable airline, but while reflecting the investment we’re making in our crews and infrastructures that are needed too.

Ed Wegel: The important issues here now, this is a loss of $2.9 million on the EBITDA line. Had we had the revenue from the contract that was deferred, we would have been closer to $40 million in revenue and that would have been just a blowout quarter for us, sometimes things happen in this business, sometimes they happen in sequence. And that’s what occurred in Q1, but we don’t see this as any indication of the sustainability and the profitability of this platform. Again, we built a platform through this whole quarter and set us up for what should be a very robust second half of this year. And again, have we not deferred that revenue from Q1 into later in the year, we would have been breakeven or profitable for this quarter, even with all of the investment that we took into this business.

And we need to emphasize that, when we invest in this business in training and recruiting, hiring and all the other things that we do here in the company, we expense them immediately. There is very, very little that gets capitalized. So while we are creating assets for the company, we are expensing them as we go. And so this leaves us clean as we move forward so that we’ve got good comparisons month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter as we move forward. Our outlook for 2023 is we’re reaffirming our forecast of $140-plus million in revenue, positive EBITDA, 75% of the $140 million is under contract. The balance will be under contract here very soon. We expect not officially to do much better than $140 million, but right now, our guidance is between $140 million and $145 million, frankly, for this year.

A little over 12,000 hours contracted for 2023 to date. We have the potential to contract up to an additional 10,000 hours depending upon aircraft delivery dates, which is a fluid element of our business, and we’ll discuss that in a few moments. This compares to about little over 10,000 hours that we contracted in 2022. Fleet size target at the year end again passenger between 9 to 12 aircraft and cargo, 2 to 6 aircraft. This all depends on the final DOT approvals and our ability to get these aircraft out of heavy maintenance and deliver to us on time, which is an industry-wide problem at this point, both on new aircraft deliveries coming from the OEM as well as used aircraft going through maintenance to be delivered to another lessee. In addition to this, later this year, we will start Department of Defense contracts.

We’re already bidding on some. We will complete our ETOPS, which allows us to operate over water 180 minutes. We will finalize our Colombian AOC applications. We are actually entering phase 3 of our AOC process in Colombia, which is the Colombian CAA air version of the FAA reviewing our manuals and moving us on to the last phase, which are booking flights. We are focused like a laser on expanding both passenger and cargo charter businesses in 2023. We are well on track. Our revenue is there. Our systems are there. Our people are there. All of the infrastructure that we need to deliver in the second half of this year has been developed between the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year. We have set the stage for great growth, profitable growth and long-term sustainability of this platform.

This gives you a sense of the breadth and depth of our operations that we’ll conduct this summer. This just shows the scheduled operations. And when I say schedule, we’re a charter airline, but we provide essential scheduled operations every day to Cuba, scheduled operations every day to the Dominican Republic and scheduled operations to Cancun and then as well, we will be operating out of Calgary for a Canadian airline called Lynx into LA, Las Vegas and Phoenix. We will be operating for Red Way out of Lincoln, Nebraska, to Las Vegas and Orlando, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Austin and Dallas, and we have some other scheduled operations for other airlines that are shown here. This gives you an idea of the breadth of our North American operation this summer.

And you can see on the bottom as well, we’ve blown out the Cuba operation. You see that we fly to 4 cities there as well as Cancun. We will start operations into Haiti at the end of this month and operations into Santo Domingo and La Romana, a year-round and this summer will peak with as many as 8 or 9 flights a week into the resort towns in the Dominican Republic. We are the only charter operator into the Dominican Republic this year from North America. We have gained 100% market share, U.S. charter markets in the Dominican Republic. Next is our operations in Europe. We will fly two airplanes, two in Netherlands out of Amsterdam. This is the initial schedule that we’ve been given. We will fly 400 hours per aircraft per month over 2 months and then 1 aircraft in September, they’ve already asked us to extend the operation through the month of September with 1 aircraft.

So this is a great operation for us. We’ll be operating all over Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Turkey and Greece. And we are really looking forward to this. As you know, our operations last year were impacted by regulatory approvals. All of that has been solved. We’ve received all the approvals that we need. We have a great relationship with TUI. We now have a 3-year deal with them, and we’re now talking to them about operations in the U.S. where we can combine our strengths and our synergy and operate for TUI operators here in the U.S. with some of their aircraft and our infrastructure and back office operations. So we are looking forward to a great summer all over Europe, all over North America, all over the Caribbean, and as well on top of this, we have all of our ad hoc operations.

So we’ll be flying to Greenland this summer for cruise lines. We’ll be flying all over South America and Central America, and we’ll be expanding our cargo operations starting this summer so that we’ll pick up another post office route as well as routes out of Mexico and Texas into some of the industrial cities in the Northeast on behalf of some automakers and some others. So our cargo operations on top of our scheduled passenger operations lead us to a very, very robust summer. And we’ll talk about the block hours that we project for this summer and into the fall. These are two aircraft that we recently added to the fleet. On the left is another airplane that we took from Alaska Airlines. We got a very good lessor airborne capital that we have been working with, and we chose to think this in what we would consider a retro delivery.

It’s got a lot of interest and a lot of kudos for this particular delivery that we put on this airplane. And as well, we took our first cargo aircraft N410GX. We received that in February, finalized all of our cargo certifications and that airplane started flying on March 10. It’s had 100% dispatch reliability. Lower fuel brand than what we had been projecting and greater reliability and the customers that we have flown this airplane for love the aircraft, love the lower belly loading system, and love the fact that it’s 50% more volume than its main competitor. And it’s just a great airplane, and we’ve got 15 more of these coming over the next 24 months. Again, when we have shown this slide previously that we are moving towards 30 aircraft by the end of 2024 moving more towards a mix an equal mix between passenger and cargo aircraft, now we’ll eventually get there probably in 2025, but we still see this as our evolution of aircraft over the next 2 years.

This is all impacted by a number of things, as we’ve discussed, heavy maintenance prior to delivery. We’ve experienced delays in every aircraft that’s come out of heavy maintenance, just like every other airline around the world has been experiencing. It’s subject to having crew availability, we have to recruit, hire and train pilots and flight of things. So that’s a constant process, and it impacts our ability to take aircraft on a certain schedule and as well as other factors, including the – our ability to put these aircraft to work to ensure ourselves that we’ve got contracts that we can fly for these aircraft as soon as they are on the certificate. But we feel very comfortable with these numbers over the next 2 years. This is our delivery plan.

The A320 was delivered and N411GX, which is our next freighter aircraft, which brings us to 2 freighters now should be delivered the last week in May. We will need to do some conformity and some regulatory work on that airplane, but we expect that airplane to be flying in revenue service in early June. And let me stress and all of you know this because we have talked about it. Our first freighter aircraft was delayed about 6.5 months coming out of conversion. And the second airplane, the second freighter is going to be delayed about 8 months. If we had had both of these aircraft as we had projected in December of last year, our profit – we would have had an additional $6 million of revenue in Q1. But we were impacted by their ability to get these aircraft out of the MRO, get the components and parts that they needed, get the manpower that they needed to get these aircraft converted and get them to us.

So significantly negatively impacted by the inability of the MROs to get the aircraft to us and that will continue for some time. But we are making the best of it. These aircraft are coming in as soon as we can get them, and we are putting it out to work as soon as we can get them. Our target plan for the rest of the year is several additional A320 passenger aircraft as well as several additional freighter aircraft. Again, we are impacted by their ability to deliver the aircraft out of heavy maintenance. And so some of these dates will slip, but that’s okay. We will deal with that, and we will adjust, we will get these airplanes in and we will get them to work as soon as we can, which is another way of saying that we need to take a longer-term view of this business.

There are lots of factors outside of our control that impact our ability to operate. We have a team that knows how to adjust to that. We have a team that knows how to accommodate those issues. We just have to work through it like every other airline is working through it as we speak. So entirely confident in our team to be able to adapt to delays in aircraft and delays in deliveries and the impact that has on our customers and our operations. But we know how to deal with that. We’ve dealt with it over the last year, and we will continue to do so. Again, take a longer-term view of this business. Where are we going to be a year from now? Where are we going to be 2 years from now? Short-term issues and invest that affect us do not impact our longer-term vision for this airline and what we will accomplish.

Ryan, why don’t you take us through passenger sales?

Ryan Goepel: Sure. Passenger sales. We’ve discussed many of these elements, but this is sort of a way of summarizing it to two major tour operators generating about $3 million a month over 600 hours of Lynx Air, 240 hours a month with of Red Way Air out of Lincoln, Nebraska. That’s starting as a 3-month program. We expect that to be year around. 150 hours per month for 4 months with the Caribbean Airline, which we expect to be extended as well. In addition to the 2,000 hours per year with TUI for the next 3 years. We’ve executed on our March Madness strategy. We talked about our servicing the NCAA. We operated over 70 flights over 30 weeks, over 3 weeks, almost 50% of all flights from our standards. Focusing on securing for the fall when we look at contracts to be secured, we’re focusing on securing NCAA Fall Football, Department of Defense and hopefully basketball another government business, which is – with a sold-out summer that’s where our sales focus is really starting to write down.

Moving to cargo, as Ed alluded to, we operated 21 days in Q1. The second aircraft will start on June 1. First aircraft, 100% dispatch reliability. Operating costs and fuel burn less than forecast. Really proving out the economics of this aircraft. With the lower belly system now installed, it is a huge – it’s a big differentiator versus the competition, which is really 737, 800 and 757. We’re very excited about this product, we’re excited having 15 more of these coming online. And we’re even more excited about what our customers are reacting to, and we truly understand the economics of this aircraft and this really does business comes down to economics.

Q&A Session

Ed Wegel: So we have projected and expected six aircraft months of greater operations in Q1, and we ended up with 21 days. Now we’re going to operate this airplane for the next 15 years. So a blip in Q1 where we had some delays in aircraft that we work through and instead of six aircraft months, we ended up with a little less than one. It’s frustrating. And it impacted us short term. But again, let me say, we’re going to be operating all of these airplanes, some of them for as long as 15 years, some for 10 years, but many of them are for as many as 15 years. This is a great airplane. So the market is a great airplane for us, and we take a long-term view of this business. We are going to build a very, very robust, very sustainable cargo business around this aircraft and then a sister ship, which will be the A330 cargo aircraft in the next year to 2 years.

So had we have six aircraft months available to us of cargo aircraft in Q1, that’s almost $7 million in revenue. And we ended up with a little less than $1 million of revenue. But again, it’s one quarter in 1 year, we’re going to be operating this airplane for 15 years. Pilot recruitment is something that we focus on at an 8 a.m. meeting every morning here in this conference room. And in Q1, we grew our pilot headcount by a little over 40%, in Q2 to date, another 30%. We’re utilizing the agreements that we have in place now to increase our pipeline, and we’ve talked about this before, OSM, CAE, L3 and our use of the Colombian AOC once we get through that certification process will allow us to attract pilots there that will fly on the Colombian certificate until we can get them up into the U.S., but we will also use those pilots to fly intra-Latin America as well as from Latin America to the U.S., which takes some pressure off of our need for U.S.-based pilots.

We are getting much better at this for a number of reasons. One, we are seen as a stable, sustainable airline now that we’ve reached 10 airplanes. And given the progress that we’ve made in cargo and our certifications. Some pilots who have left us for major airlines are – we’ve got two calls from pilots this week asking that they could come back to GlobalX. The grass is not as green at some of these major airlines as many of them think. And some of them, the rest have come back to us. We think that’s a pretty good sign. So we’ve been successful in our recruiting and hiring upgrade for pilots, both direct entry captains as well as first officers. As we grow, as we get stronger, as we show that we have the quality of life here that is better than other places where they can fly and that word gets out through the pilot ranks throughout the industry, we think that we will do better than our fair share of pilots and good pilots as we move forward.

Ryan Goepel: Yes. One thing that I wanted to touch on is on the Investor Relations side. We did have an issue – I wouldn’t say an issue, there was a concern, I think, on the last call as it related to warrants that were expiring. On April 26, 4.6 million warrants did expire, which reduced our fully diluted share count by a little under 8%. If you look on the right, an updated cap table of our common Class A and Class B. We also show our existing warrants that are outstanding. It should be noted of those 11 million warrants, 9 million of those warrants are restricted in the sense they can’t convert into more than 4.9% of common equity. So from that perspective, it’s likely those will go to expiry if they do get converted.

If you look at the fully diluted number, again, one of the elements of recruitment is on RSUs. We really do encourage employee ownership and employee RSUs for retention. Those – most of those vest over 3 years. But again, I think our capital structure as it is right now is pretty tight considering where it was from the beginning and to where we are now. If you look at some of the initiatives we did in Q1, we have a digital program that has increased our mailing list by 14,000 names, many of you are on it. Attended two major microcap conference, Planet Micro Cap and Sequire in Puerto Rico. Registered to present at the Gravitas conference, June 5, in Los Angeles, and we are still planning an uplift in conjunction with growth and capital raise in 2023.

It will not be a Q2 event. It will be later in ‘23 as we – is our ambition, as we’ve alluded to on the previous call.

Ed Wegel: As we said in the press release that we put out today, we’re in active and, I would say, advanced discussions with a number of equity funds and other credit funds. We are financing our business going forward. We’ve got a tremendous amount of interest. I need to be careful about what I say, but I think that we are in a good position. And let me stress something that I said in my preamble to this presentation. This management team has been very, very diligent and very, very careful in how we raise money and how much money we raise and the dilution that results from them. I think that we have done between us and the Board of Directors who’ve done a great job in managing that. Again, we have gotten to this point in our life cycle with $28 million of cash, $28 million, $7 million of which we still have, it’s on our balance sheet for deposits for airplanes and airports and other deposits that we have to make.

Given the progress that we’ve made, 121 flag carrier with all of the certifications that we have plus cargo, plus the ability to tie up 15 A321 freighters, all of those things combined for the price tag that we have brought this in for and the dilution or the minimal dilution that we believe we have endured I think is a tremendous statement about this management team and this Board of Directors in delivering value to its shareholders. Are we frustrated with the share price? We see a lot on social media, and I get a lot of messages meaning the up over it. And all I can say is I have more shares than anybody out there. And so if anybody is as frustrated about the share price, it’s got to be me. What I do is I come in here every morning at 7:00 a.m., and I don’t leave until 7 p.m. and we work hard every day, every day, including Saturdays and Sundays to build this company to create shareholder value, and we will continue to do that.

We have a tremendous platform that we have created, and we’re about to reap the benefits of that as we get into the second half of this year. We will do what we can in outreach. Ryan has done an incredible job. He must talk to 30 or 40 investment groups every week about who we are and what we’re doing. He attends the conferences. We have Zoom calls. We are getting the word out there. A lot of this is restricted because of our – where we are listed and many institutions will not be able to invest in us until we get to NASDAQ. We think about NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange just about every day and how we can get there. And I will assure you that we are focused on that and doing everything that we can to get it. No one is as interested in the stock price as I am, but I’m more interested right now where we are in our life cycle as a company.

I am more interested in ensuring that we have built a sustainable, profitable platform that can continue to grow and continue to compete effectively against our competitors. We have put all of the building blocks in place, certifications, aircraft, people infrastructure to do that. That’s the most important thing at this point because we take a long-term view of this business, and we’re creating long-term value for our shareholders. Finally, just something that we wanted to ensure everyone knew and we’re quite proud of this. We worked very, very hard here to create a culture with the right set of values the way we work with and we treat our team members. We went through a pretty rigorous certification process with surveys and interviews with our team members by an outside group called Great Place to Work.

They have certified companies like American Express and Delta Airlines and others. So we went through that process, and we received our certification for this coming year. We’re quite proud of that. We’re putting that in all of our recruiting materials, especially to pilots and flight attendance. And we think that this indicates that we’re on the right track in terms of building a culture with a set of values that will allow us to maintain this airline and grow it profitably in the years to come. So with that, Grant, I’ll turn it back to you for questions. And again, we appreciate everyone for your interest and support on this call. Grant, fire away.

A – Grant Howard: Ed, Ryan, great job as always. And as I say, every quarter on these webinars, Ryan find me another company listed on a junior exchange in North America, that’s a complex as much or so little as you spoke out. So congratulations. Number of questions already, and I’ll get right into it. 400 plus employees, can you please tell us what your monthly payroll is including taxes and benefits?

Ed Wegel: Well, Grant, again, I appreciate Grant Howard for saying this together. We appreciate everyone’s participation with everybody, a little over 40 people, which is about what we have done in the past. We will just say that this management team and Board are working very, very hard for our shareholders. We made significant progress in Q1 in developing our infrastructure, our corporate development so that we can take advantage of the opportunities in front of us this summer and this fall and going on into 2024. We are set up to be able to take the freighters. We are set up to be able to take the passenger aircraft. We are set up to bring on more clients and increase the flying that we do for our current clients as well as add new clients to our roster.

So, we are very bullish about this company. We are very bullish about our prospects and the opportunities in front of us. Again, we take a longer term view of this business and I believe that, that view has paid dividends because we are now in a position over the next 12 months to double the size of this company. So with that, Grant, we appreciate your efforts and appreciate everyone’s time. And Ryan, do you have anything to add?

Ryan Goepel: No. As Ed alluded to, I think there is a lot of positives coming out of this quarter. We believe we are really well set up for the future.

Ed Wegel: It’s important for investors to look at the progress that we made this quarter in developing our infrastructure to take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us. Tremendous amount of effort, assets that we have created that don’t go on the balance sheet, but are there for us now to monetize in terms of increased line for more clients on more routes and more parts of the world. So, with that Grant, thank you very much. I look forward to talking to everyone again next quarter.

Grant Howard: Thank you, gentlemen and thank you those who attended.