Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.Savi Syth Hey, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Just a question on the MAX deliveries. It looks like you had three more deliveries than the prior plan in 1Q, but for the full year, kind of slipped a little bit. Just curious how you’re feeling about confidence on kind of the MAX deliveries, especially given the recent news?Gerry Laderman Okay. Savi, from what we know on the recent news, we don’t think that’s going to have much of an impact on us, certainly won’t have an impact on second quarter and what – and I think you may have seen this yourself, is Boeing has gotten back on track on delivering aircraft. The issues that they had over the prior few years, they have really managed well. And the impact from what we know today for the full year just will be minor.Savi Syth Okay.
That’s helpful, Gerry. And maybe along those lines, a follow-up on the fuel efficiency, there is a little kind of surprised by kind of what we saw here in the first quarter, maybe a little bit less than what we’ve seen last year. What’s your expectation around how that trends kind of going forward, especially kind of given that, that’s another part of the kind of the cost benefit in the United Next Plan?Gerry Laderman Well, as we start seeing more and more of the MAXs, we will start seeing that improvement that we’ve sort of talked about on United Next. Remember, we’ve just started taking delivery of those incremental aircraft. And there’ll be a nice pop in that as well once the MAX 10 delivers at some point.Savi Syth So just from a critical mass standpoint, when does that – when do you think roughly that is based on like what you know today, I guess?Gerry Laderman Yes.
It starts to kick in next year, critical mass, maybe the year after.Savi Syth Okay, that’s very helpful. Thank you.Gerry Laderman I’m just going to see the trend. Quarter-by-quarter.Operator The next question comes from Mike Linenberg from Deutsche Bank. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.Mike Linenberg Hey, good morning. When I look at your sort of loads from fourth quarter to March quarter, I mean, you can see that seasonal hit. And Andrew, when I saw that I sort of thought maybe it had to do with a higher no-show rate, but you sort of just addressed that, that is not an issue. As you add more service to places like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, etcetera, does that – we should see improvement in that, right? Maybe you never actually are able to get to the level of, say, American or Delta from a seasonal perspective.
But to some extent, you should be able to mitigate that as we think about the seasonality. Is that – is that kind of where we’re headed? Do we see that really start to narrow versus the industry?Andrew Nocella It’s a good question. And our intent is to get it to narrow. But we do – we’re simply smaller in Florida due to a lot of reasons that – that can’t be addressed in a matter of a few quarters, we have to be addressed over years. And so while our goal is to narrow that gap in Q1, I don’t think to be blunt, we’re going to be able to eliminate it. Clearly, the introduction of counter-seasonal fly into the South Pacific definitely helps put it in the right direction, and we will be looking for more opportunities and we will be looking to grow Florida, I think, faster than probably most of our competitors because we’re just so going to continue to be our weakest quarter and a recovery of business traffic in Q1 will do the most to help our relative Q1 results.Mike Linenberg Okay.
Thanks. And then just sort of as a follow-on and tied to that, when you look at the announcement that you did make yesterday, I mean it’s – it seems like it’s going to need a decent amount of additional capacity. And when I look at your fleet this year, I think you took two 778s in the March quarter, it does not look like we’re going to see any more wide-bodies coming in. How are you funding a lot of that new service later this year, should we assume that maybe it’s going to – China is not going to come back as much? Are you going to pull from other parts of the operation? I’m just trying to figure out where you’re going to get the aircraft because some of these routes require more than one airplane just to do daily round trip service?Scott Kirby Definitely was quite a few aircraft heading towards the South Pacific.
What I would tell you is that we just seasonally reduced Europe and we would otherwise, but many of those wide-bodies into our domestic system and this year, our maintenance. And this year, those aircraft will be flying to the South Pacific, which we think is their best use. In regards to China, we continue to be stuck at four flights per week. We are preparing to supply more than that, but have been unable to get that done so far. But hopefully, later this year, we will be flying more to China, and we have the aircraft to do so if the conditions are – allow us to do so.Mike Linenberg Great. Thank you.Operator The next question comes from Duane Pfennigwerth from Evercore ISI. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.Duane Pfennigwerth Hey, good morning.
I wanted to ask about one of the themes Scott started the call with on flexibility. And maybe a follow-up to Mike’s question just there, but first on seasonal shaping – capacity. Given the new normal, is there a greater emphasis recently on seasonally shaping capacity? And how does maybe lack of regional lift or lack of ability to kind of flex up on regionals limit your ability to do that, if at all?Andrew Nocella It’s a really good question. And I am hopeful that after further evidence that we will be able to operate a more stable schedule all the way from March through the end of October, which I think will definitely benefit our cost structure having less of the peak. However, we are not there just yet. I think we need to make it through this year.
We need to see how the remote work schedules continue to play out. We need to, in particular, see how this September and this October do – we were fantastic, obviously, last year. And I think that will help us validate for next year whether we actually change the seasonal shape in, as I just described. And hopefully, we can but we’re not ready to really jump into the deep end of that pool today. So we will continue to peak the airline in July as we normally do, and we will see where we go from there.In terms of regional jets, the lack of regional jets has definitely hurt our connectivity. This is an issue. I talked about it, and we’re very focused on rebuilding that connectivity with the right jets going forward. And in fact, we don’t intend to ever go back to the fleet of approximately 600 regional jets we had in 2019.
We think the economics have changed. We think the business has changed and we need to change with it. That being said, on the good news front, the regional jet pilot situation has recently – in our mind, stabilized. We’re no longer losing pilots at the same rate we were earlier – very early this year or last year. And the production of block hours in our regional jet division at the end of this year will be consistent with the production of block hours that we started the year with. And I can tell you that our original budget for that was not that. We thought we would continue to see deterioration. So the good news there is the regional jets are going to be able to at least temporarily help us boost our connectivity as we wait for all of our mainline jets from Boeing to deliver over the next 2 or so years.Duane Pfennigwerth Thanks, Andrew for that detail.
And then just sticking with the flexibility theme on capacity and the idea that you could kind of take capacity lower if the environment warranted, how much lower could you take it, I guess, relative to the high teens, 20% in the back half? And just conceptually, are we solving for margins this year? Or are we solving for CASM? Thank you for taking the questions. Andrew Nocella I don’t think we’re ever solving for CASM. We’re solving for margin and, of course, the 10% to 12%. So that will always be our focus. And we’re going to maintain the flexibility. Like I said, I’m pretty bullish about the international environment, and that’s going to generate the large lion’s share of our ASM growth this year. And I expect International to be strong all the way through the end of October and so far, chose that.
