Mesa Air Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:MESA) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Linenberg: Oh, yeah. Hey, a good afternoon, everyone. Jonathan, just the 38 CRJ-900s, how do we think about them sort of longer term? Are they more of a stop gap measure once you start to staff up the Embraers that are currently parked? Like if we were to fast forward two or three years from now, is it 38 CRJ-900s or is it maybe a dozen? Is it 20 or is it going to be a core fleet? I’m just sort of thinking about it within the context of some of the restrictions out there within your partners’ contracts, et cetera?

Jonathan Ornstein: Yeah. No. Obviously, what will come into play here is the scope restrictions. And just to be clear, I mean, we are well within the scope. We’re not going to — that’s not going to be an issue, obviously. But with that, I think the ultimate goal would be to us to operate all 80 of our E-Jets. So from that standpoint, there may not be room for 900s. Now that being said, there are a lot of other operators that may or may not be able to operate the 7060 aircraft that they have. There may be a way to consolidate a lot of the flying on to fewer shelves. So I think that the 900s may go to 70 seats and fill in. So I think the idea, and I feel pretty confident and I would agree on this is we have training capability, and we’ve got almost 300 pilots flying the 900s.

We’re not going to just turn around and tell them we don’t need them anymore. I’m pretty sure we’re on our way to keep everybody fully utilized. It’s going to take a while for the industry to recover from this. And so I think there’ll be room for those airplanes for a while. And I think for a while, I’m not saying for 10 years, but I would think that we’d be operating the airplanes in two years down the road. I don’t think everyone will recover by then, and we’ll still have room for those aircraft within the existing scope.

Michael Linenberg: Jonathan, on that, on that mark, is it is it still true that the CRJ-900s are potentially the lowest cost 76 or 76 cedars in the market today, that those costs, as I recall, you really had a pretty meaningful advantage there historically, with the new pay rates is that still the case? And what is the differential in cost between maybe the E-175 with 76 seats and the CRJ-900 with 76 seats with the new LOPA? Is it a 10% better advantage on a block hour basis, 20%? Any color on that? Because as I recall, that was one of the unique competitive advantages of that shelf.

Jonathan Ornstein: Yeah. Well, look, the benefit on the 900s is clearly on fuel burn. It’s about 8% more fuel effective, right? However, when you look at regional aircraft, and it’s just so outsized that you have to take it into account, it really depends on where you are on your engines and what aircraft? I mean, you can normalize your engines, but the fact of the matter is there’s probably aircraft out there that will come to an LLP event, which is up to almost $5 million event, and it just will never be done. And so if you take that expense out over the lifetime of the aircraft, that makes whatever aircraft it is going to be very inexpensive. So everything really revolves around engine management and how you look at owning engines or leasing engines.