American Airlines Group, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the American Airlines Group for Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. Today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. And if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. And now, I would like to turn the conference to your moderator, Managing Director of Investor Relations, Mr. Dan Cravens.

Thanks, Victor, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to the American Airlines Group Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. So, thanks again for joining us, and at this point, I'll hand the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Doug Parker.

Thank you, Dan. Thanks, everybody, for being with us. So, look, before I begin my prepared remarks, I want to preemptively state that we will not be commenting nor answering questions on the recent activity in our stock price. As a rule, we don't speculate on the day-to-day movements in our share price, and we'll stick to that rule today. So we do have a lot that we do want to talk about, so I'll get us started, and then Robert and Derek will add some more, and we'll take questions after that, as we always do. So, look, 2020 was obviously an incredibly difficult year, but we couldn't be prouder of what the American Airlines team accomplished in the face of extraordinary challenges. Our team kept the country and economy moving, and they did so safely and with great care. American Airlines flew more customers last year than any other airline, And our team did so while running a solid operation, ensuring our aircraft and airport facilities were clean and safe for every customer who needed us. The year ended on a high note with the extension of the payroll support program. This positive outcome is the result of the company and union leadership working arm in arm to bring PSP2 over the finish line. It's clear that great things come about when we raise our voices together for the greater good. Of course, also grateful to our elected officials who recognize that the airline industry is plays a vital role in the recovery from the pandemic. You know, we talk a lot about best days here in America. We use that term to describe moments that make America truly unique and why our team believes it's the best airline in the world. December 24th was that best day for me. We welcomed back all of our furloughed team members and reinstated their paying benefits. Thanks to our tremendous support teams working around the clock, we were able to deliver thousands of colleagues their first paycheck in a month. It's easy to forget that a lot happened in 2020 on top of navigating a pandemic. Yes, we took aggressive steps to permanently lower our costs, increase our liquidity, and care for customers in ways we've never seen before due to COVID-19. But we also accomplished significant milestones, like entering into groundbreaking new partnerships and reaching a new joint collective bargaining agreement covering our fleet and maintenance colleagues. And just last month, we seamlessly returned the Boeing 737 MAX to commercial service. We'll talk more about these accomplishments shortly. As we sit here today, I can unequivocally state that despite every challenge thrown our way, I've never been proud of a company in my entire career. The American Airlines team and our industry is incredibly resilient, and this past year has proven that. As we turn our attention to the year ahead, 2021 will be a year of recovery. There's still a lot of unknowns, of course, when or how quickly demand will return. Make no mistake, it will return. The good news is there are vaccines. And while it will take some time for them to be widely distributed, progress is being made every day, and that's encouraging. We don't know exactly when we may return to prior levels of demand. What we do know is that we're prepared to withstand the ongoing crisis, irrespective of how long the recovery takes. We ended the year with over $14 billion of total available liquidity. And more importantly, we've used this opportunity to make America much stronger. When the recovery does occur, we'll be prepared in even better positions than we were prior to the pandemic. And we'll do so by taking care of our team, our customers, and our company. On the team front, we're proud of the progress we've made, especially in 2020. This crisis has brought the American team together and strengthened the relationship between management and our union partners in incredible ways. Since the onset of the pandemic, we've been meeting with our unions every two weeks to discuss the company's response to the crisis and our path forward. And we stood side by side as we worked to advocate, PSP, and PSP2. And while we made the difficult decision to furlough 19,000 team members last fall, we prepared for that reality in a way that was cooperative and collaborative with our union partners. Our hope is to expand what we've accomplished in the past year, knowing that together we can be the best in the industry at advocating and caring for our team. For our customers, we're doubling down on operational excellence. Once we're back at full speed, we're positioned to run the best airline American Airlines has ever run in terms of operating reliability. We've reset our network to focus even more on our strongest and best-performing hubs and migrated to a much simpler, more modern fleet. We've talked before about efficient growth in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Charlotte, and that work is now done. We continue to modernize our facilities at Washington Reagan and improve the connectivity of Chicago O'Hare, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Miami. And we're building a much stronger network than we had before. In addition to the inherent strength of our hubs, in 2020 we established new and innovative partnerships with Alaska and JetBlue, It will make us stronger on the West Coast and in the Northeast. We've also done a lot over the past year to make America a much more efficient airline. We had a truly unique opportunity to shut down the largest airline in the world and rebuild around our strengths. This enabled us to bring forward and accelerate a number of efficiencies in 2020 that were originally planned for the longer term. And we are passionately pursuing those efficiencies as we recover through 2021. Derek will elaborate on this in his remarks, but two of the best examples are the permanent retirement of more than 150 aircraft and five different aircraft types and the 30% reduction in our management step. We believe the efficiencies we've built into the business will drive more than $1.3 billion of permanent, non-volume-related, non-fuel-related savings in 2021 and, of course, beyond. So, in summary, we could not be more proud of the work the American Airlines team has accomplished over the past year. We're very well positioned and feel great about where America is going to be as demand returns. With that, I'll turn it over to Robert.