Helane Becker: Thanks very much, operator. Hi, everybody. Peter, you said a number that I wanted to double check. How many people did you say you’ve hired in the last year?
Peter Ingram: I said about 20%, just a hair under 20% of our employees on payroll today have joined the company since the beginning of 2022.
Helane Becker: Right. So that’s — you only have about 775,000, so that’s a significant amount of new talent that’s been trained in the last one year. So when do you think they hit their productivity levels that contribute to the bottom-line?
Peter Ingram: I think for a lot of the group’s, Helane, you get the productivity fairly quickly. You’re always wanting to do more training, probably over the course of part of the year last year if you think about our airports organization, we would have people who were trained on certain functions, but they weren’t necessarily training to be cross utilized across the operation and as we get more of that training done, it makes you a little bit more efficient and adaptable, in the day-to-day operation. So that. I would say is the story in that part of the business. With flight attendants for us, we are fully staffed to be able to operate a — not only the schedule we’re operating today, we’re not planning on having any material hiring of flight attendants this year, although we had a lot last year.
There it’s just really a question of having the ASMs back, which is, to a certain extent a function of getting our wide bodies flying to Japan, getting the A321s back in the operation at full force would be helpful and sort of flying the full capacity that we have. So in terms of — that’s what really is the one limiting factor on efficiency there. And then as Shannon was alluding to with regards to pilots, we still have a lot of training this year, and we did a lot of training last year. So — And as we work to position through so that we have the right staffing for the initial tranche of the freighter aircraft and work to move people through the training cycles to get equipped for the 787s coming on later this year, we’ll still have some unproductive time in terms of pilots spending time in training rather than flying revenue block hours for us and that is going to continue, really throughout this year and probably start to level out some next year.
But as we are in growth mode with the freighters we’ll still have some jobs that carry-on activity beyond, I would say, a normal steady-state level, even as we go into 2024.
Helane Becker: Okay that’s hugely helpful. Thanks, Peter. And then just for my follow-up question on the Japan routes. I know that DOT rejected the initial alliance that you had put forth, would you consider circling back around and applying for an alliance again or JV or however you want to term it with Japan Air to sort of in the short term anyway improve those results.
Peter Ingram: Yes. So, we’ve continued our commercial relationship with Japan Airlines and we still work closely with them on codeshare and interline and some frequent flyer reciprocity. We’re doing that without the antitrust immunity protection that you get from an approved antitrust immunized joint venture with DOT. So that constraints a little bit how much we can optimize that relationship and how closely we can work with JAL. For the time being that is our plan going forward is to continue working on that way. We still have the opportunity to go back to DOT at some point and we spent some time in 2020 when the (ph) application was turned down, trying to understand the concerns that DOT had and obviously the time came when we wanted to reapply we would hopefully be in a good position to be able to address those and structure the partnership in a way that it made sense in terms of how DOT looks at it.
