Brian West: Thanks, Seth. First and foremost, I remind everyone that we do have $17 billion of liquidity today, comprised of the cash on hand as well as our credit lines. What we’re focused on is a first half cash usage that is resulting from all of the actions we’re taking to stabilize both the factory and the supply chain to set ourselves up for success as we move to the second half and into 2025. And to that end, any supplemental funding that I talked about would do two things. First of all, it would restore our cash balance to the historical level that you point out, that $10 billion-ish. But it also means that we want to continue our practice to stay well ahead of our near-term maturities. And by near term, I mean roughly the next 12 months.
So that’s what we’re thinking about as we sit here today. We will be prudent and thoughtful. We believe the market would be open to us. And as we’ve said consistently, the most important thing is our investment-grade credit rating that we think a lot about, and it is a priority.
Seth Seifman: Great. Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Sheila Kahyaoglu : Good morning, Dave, Brian, Matt. Can we talk about the 737 rate again? How much of that is self-inflicted versus the FAA processes that are in place? And when we think about the 90-day timeline that comes to a head with the IAM negotiations over the summertime, I would assume, so how do we think about the IAM progressing as well? And how much was incorporated into the $10 billion free cash flow target?
Dave Calhoun: Okay, Sheila, that’s like a three-parter.
Sheila Kahyaoglu: Sorry about that.
Dave Calhoun: Yes, I’ll do my best. So I — all of the 737 disruption that it goes on today, in my view, is self-inflicted in the sense that we’ve made the decision that the amount of traveled work, particularly as it relates to the fuselage that was embedded and normalized in our factory that we would make a dramatic reduction in it. So that move we made with all the inspectors and all the rework operators down to Wichita, the visibility we’ve provided to the Wichita workforce with respect to the rework that we were doing. The FAA didn’t demand that. We demanded it because it’s — we’re determined to get ahead of it. What the FAA is doing, and they have been very diligent and business-like in the way they’ve approached this is they want a control plan.
And they want a control plan in 90 days that, in essence, monitors and measures whether our production system is in control moving forward. And if it ever gets out of control, the signals are clear, both to the FAA and to us even more importantly, and that we don’t — we won’t extend. We won’t rate up. We won’t do anything until it is under control, and that has to stay that way. So 90 days isn’t like a wave a magic flag, and everything is great, and you guys can go from 38 to 40. It’s quite different. It is simply a set of metrics and controls that we both agree are the right ones to monitor the performance of our factories. And I am confident it will be a good set of controls and something that we can live up to. And we’re going to work our way through this one.
As I said, the most important thing that occurs over the next six months or frankly, starting in January when we launched this effort is going to be the pace at which clean fuselages come out of Wichita. That is the most essential part of this equation. With respect to IAM, as you know, we work through the summer, there’s a lot of discussions going on between our team and their teams. It feels productive. While we’re doing that, we have huge engagement with a relatively new workforce across our factories in light of what we’ve just experienced. That engagement helps. It doesn’t hurt. I am — I can’t ever tell you I’m perfectly confident that we rush to an agreement. But we’re all going to try to solve for continuous production. And I think we — I think our chances are good.
So — but we’re not going to know until we get really close to the deadline. And that’s just real life and labor negotiation. And I think that covers most of what you asked. Was there any other part I missed?
Sheila Kahyaoglu: The $10 billion free cash flow, does it incorporate the IAM negotiation?
Dave Calhoun: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.
Sheila Kahyaoglu: Okay. Thank you.
Dave Calhoun: Yeah.
Operator: Thank you. And the next question is from the line of Noah Poponak from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Noah Poponak: Hi. Good morning, everybody.
Dave Calhoun: Hey, Noah.
Noah Poponak: I guess this is sort of asked, and you’ve alluded to pieces of the answer to this, but I’m just going to ask it anyway because it seems to be the most important thing, which is just how long does it take to do everything you need to do on product quality? And how much of it needs to be done before you can increase production again versus how much of it can be done as you’re increasing production again? Because I’ve heard you now reference six months a few times, and you’ve referenced the back half of the year looking a lot different than the first half of the year. And six months isn’t a short window of time. But in the context of what you’re doing and referencing 30,000 ideas and if you’re going to take Spirit in, that hasn’t even happened yet, and it’s almost May, when you were working with the FAA on 787 a few years ago, you didn’t deliver one for 18 months.
So I don’t know what you can say to that, but how do we get confident that the time just doesn’t keep ripping by, and you’re not iterating back and forth and there isn’t a much longer window of time needed to do everything you need to do to start to ramp again?
