The result is unsurprising. Our margins have dramatically and structurally improved and we’re only in the early innings of that journey. For the first quarter of 2024, we expect a loss per share between negative $0.35 and negative $0.85. While our core costs remain on track, our first quarter CASM-ex faces a few headwinds. First, the cancellations of the MAX 9 flights have reduced first quarter capacity. Due to the close-in nature of these cancellations, most of our expenses are fixed. And we also incurred additional interrupted trip expenses. We expect the combination of these items will increase CASM-ex by approximately 3 points. Second, as we mentioned that the contra-revenue reclassification in the distribution expense is a 1 point headwind.
Third, the impact of new labor agreements as they annualize adds an additional 3 to 4 points. And fourth, a higher volume of engine events and continued supply chain challenges lead to another 1 point of CASM-ex headwind. While the first two items I mentioned are United specific headwinds, labor and maintenance are an industry wide issue and the primary drivers of the cost conversions that Scott described earlier. Most importantly, we’re confident that the pace of inflation in our costs will continue to be favorable versus our historically lower cost competitors. Building off of our 2023 momentum, we expect full year 2024 earnings per share to be between $9 to $11. We are encouraged by the trends we are seeing and our United Next plan is working well.
This is our guidance but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that our internal targets are higher. We plan to update our longer term financial targets at our upcoming Investor Day. Looking ahead, we intend to take a different approach to guidance. As demonstrated in 2023 and just recently with the MAX grounding, we operate in a dynamic industry. With the no excuses philosophy, we intended to take United off the detailed quarterly metrics shortly after I joined and led the Investor Relations team. The pandemic interrupted those plans. But now that we’re pass the crisis and as we deliver on our earnings per share target, you should expect us to remove TRASM, CASM-ex and capacity guidance and focus on earnings per share. We’ve provided RASM and TRASM for the first quarter but this is likely the last time we will do so for our quarter.
We will continue to provide fulsome commentary on the trends impacting our business. And we will continue to be transparent with our views of the longer term future for both United and the industry that we’re managing this business towards. We will earn your confidence by delivering bottom line results. Shifting gears to the fleet. In the fourth quarter, we took delivery of 20 Boeing MAX and four Airbus A321 aircraft. Looking ahead to 2024, we have a total of 107 aircraft scheduled to deliver, 31 of those being MAX 9. It is unrealistic at this time to believe all of those aircraft will deliver as currently planned. We also have 277 MAX 10 aircraft on order through the remainder of the decade and an additional 200 auctions for MAX 10 aircraft.
We are monitoring Boeing’s progress towards certification of the MAX 10 closely. At this time, our current aircraft delivery schedule would lead to a total CapEx of approximately $9 billion in 2024. But given the MAX 9 grounding and the continued supply chain issues, there is this downward bias to our 2024 spend. We also expect a reduction in orders and deliveries from Boeing in 2025. This will require reworking of our fleet plan and we will share the details when that work is complete. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $16.1 billion in liquidity, including our undrawn revolver. Our adjusted net debt to EBITDAR was 2.9 times, consistent with our leverage target of less than 3 times provided at the start of the year. Managing the business towards positive free cash flow will be a top priority for our team over the coming years.
Our stock is deeply undervalued, trading at less than 4 times earnings despite the fact that we delivered 19.5% revenue growth and realized significant structural improvement and relative profitability in 2023. But we also understand that generating free cash flow consistently even while we execute our United Next strategy is an important component to increasing our valuation. 2023 marked the first full year of United Next plan. We are thrown some curve balls but we adapted quickly and exited the year stronger than ever. It’s clear that when customers are given a choice they are choosing United. You can see it clearly in our revenue and margin performance relative to the industry. Finally, I’m happy to announce we will be hosting an Investor Day on May 1st in Chicago.
We plan to provide an update on our progress with the United Next plan and introduce some of the United tailwinds that will drive continued margin expansion and sustainable free cash flow. I’m encouraged by our results in a relative momentum and I’m looking forward to delivering another solid year for our employees, customers and shareholders. With that, I will pass it over to Kristina to start the Q&A.
Kristina Edwards: Thanks, Mike. We will now take questions from the analyst community. Please limit yourself to one question and if needed, one follow question. Tegan, please describe the procedure to ask the questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] All right, we will go to the first caller in queue, Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley.
Ravi Shanker: So maybe Scott, you said at the start that you saw pressure on your 2023 capacity and I think you kind of went through your order book and said there’s downward pressure there expected as well. Does this want to make you look at the long term United Next growth plans and kind of what can be practically achieved in the coming years, is that something you can expect to do in the Investor Day?
Mike Leskinen: Look, the reality is that with the MAX grounding, this is the kind of straw that broke the camel’s back with believing that the MAX 10 will deliver on the schedule we had hoped for. And so we’re working through an alternate plan. We do expect our growth rate to slow in coming years. Though United Next plan is firmly on track it will take a little longer to get there. And we’re working on alternate plans to see how much higher we can elevate the growth with the MAX 10. Now we’re still counting on Boeing and we’re monitoring the MAX 10 closely and we’re rooting and we’ll do everything we can to help that aircraft get certified. It’s a great aircraft. But we can’t count on it and so we’re working on alternate plans. The details we’ll share when we have them. I hope we’ll have more by the first quarter conference call, and we’ll certainly have a fulsome update for you by our May 1st Investor Day.
Ravi Shanker: And maybe as a quick follow-up. I think you guys have said Asia can be pretty decent kind of as it comes back. I think you guys were profitable on the China routes prior to the pandemic. Correct me if I’m wrong. Do you think Asia margins can be better than before and is that a temporary demand catch up, or do you think that’s sustainable kind of in the new normal?
Andrew Nocella: As we rebuilt Asia, we definitely wanted to rebuild it. So it has sustainably higher margins than it did pre-pandemic. And we’ve gone about that, I think, very carefully. We’re back to our pre-pandemic size, which is nice at this point. And China was profitable for us pre-pandemic, although, it was not our highest margin climb to be fair. As we bring it all back, our goal is to make sure that the Asia Pacific entity produces margins that are similar to that across the rest of our global network. And I think that at least in 2023, Asia Pacific is well ahead. I do expect things to move around a bit, particularly as more China flights come back online. But I think we’re particularly bullish about what Asia looks like going forward. We added a lot of capacity in the quarter, we are absorbing it, and we expect in Q2 and Q3 that capacity is going to do very well. So very bullish about the long term prospects in Asia post pandemic.
