Robin Hayes : Hey, I guess just to give — because I think all the questions on cost are very — have been very well put. And I know Joanna touched on this earlier and it’s come up with other airlines. But just to kind of help people understand the sort of the investment going into some of the benefits around reducing operational risk. So Joanna talked about the ability to have more pilot reserves and starting up pilot. So approximately every 5% of additional pilots that you’re hiring to fly the same schedule you had before, that’s going to be just over one point of CASM in the year. Every time you take utilization down two points what you had before, that’s about one point of CASM in terms of the impact. So these investments are quite meaningful, and that’s why you’re seeing them in the underlying CASM.
And we do have optionality over time to dial some of those back, and Joanna alluded to some of that being dialed back this year. But I’m not sure that we can run certainly this airline like we did in 2019. And so we’re going to have to be very measured and very thoughtful, and frankly find other opportunities in the cost structure to allow us continuing to make these investments. We have seen the benefit. Now you do see other benefits with these investments. So if you have higher completion factor, you have more on-time performance, that’s going to help your operating cost. You’ll protect more revenue because you’ll be able — have less in vouchers or refunds or travel credit. So the benefits are there, but it’s going to, I think, mean a different revenue and cost profile in terms of where you spend, how you spend and where you see the revenue benefit to perhaps what we used to pre-2019.
So there are opportunities over time to bring those costs back down, but we’re going to have to tread into it very carefully to make sure that we’re not, sort of, going back to some of the challenges that we saw and others saw earlier in 2022.
Conor Cunningham: Appreciate the context.
Operator: Thank you. Next question comes from Helane Becker at Cowen. Please, go ahead. Helane, your line is open. You may proceed with your question.
Helane Becker: Right. Thanks very much operator. Robin, on the Spirit, I get a lot of questions from arbs who don’t understand why you are planning for a first quarter or first half 2024 close, when it seems perfectly obvious to me that it would be in the second half — first half of next year versus second half of this year. So maybe you could go through some of the hurdles that you have to go through before you can get the approval.
Robin Hayes: Well, yes, so I mean, there’s really two outcomes. We’re able to reach an agreement with the Department of Justice. And if we do that, it’s possible that could happen sooner, but the time line is down to the Department of Justice, and we certainly want to be respectful of that. The second scenario is that we don’t get an agreement with the Department of Justice and they decide to sue us, and we go to court as we did in the NEA. And that process can take several months to go through. And so, I think, for both of those reasons, an assumption on closing this transaction in the first part of 2024 is the right one to make.
Helane Becker: Yes. That makes sense. Thank you. And then, as we think about the balance sheet, this one’s probably for Ursula, is there an opportunity to accelerate debt paydown, or is that not something you would consider?
