United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

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Thank you, Brianna. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, which is available on our website at ir.united.com. Information in yesterday's release and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our earnings release form 10-K and 10-Q and other reports filed with the SEC by United Airlines Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors. Unless otherwise noted, we will be discussing our financial metrics on a non-GAAP basis on this call. Please refer to the related definitions and reconciliations in our press release. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings release. Joining us on the call today to discuss our results and outlook are our Chief Executive Officer, Scott Kirby, President Brett Hart, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Nacella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Leskinen. In addition, we have other members of the executive team on the line and available to assist in the Q&A. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Scott.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you, Christina. The United team produced another solid quarter. We did that while further sharpening our focus on improving our already strong safety culture over the last several months. Looking at a wide variety of metrics, our airline is safer than ever before. With our culture rooted in constantly striving to make our airline safer for our employees, and our customers, so we're continuing to work closely with the FAA and other partners to do exactly that. Additionally, thank you to our employees for delivering top-tier operational performance amidst challenging weather, including Hurricane Beryl in Houston, and getting our customers to their destinations safe and on time. While this was a quarter where industry capacity growth exceeded still-solid demand, it was also a quarter that continued to show the industry developing along the lines that we've been anticipating for the past couple of years. The pressure other US airlines are experiencing today is due in large part to their unprofitable flying in many domestic markets. It was always inevitable that carriers would begin to cancel this unprofitable flying, and you see that happening in earnest in the second half of August in the schedules. As a result, it appears that domestic industry capacity growth will moderate by roughly five points by the fourth quarter compared to where we were in the second quarter. which should provide a constructive setup as we close out the year and a particularly beneficial backdrop heading into 2025. Since COVID began in early 2020, United has consistently been ahead of the curve on the big picture developments driving the industry. We're running the best operation in our history, despite operating in the most difficult hubs in the world, Chicago, Newark, and San Francisco, and despite having more exposure to the issues at Boeing than any airline in the world. Our people are proud of United, and they have completely transformed the service and care for our customers. And we have the best commercial and revenue management teams in the world that are always on top of the demand environment, making strategic and technical adjustments to drive revenue. And the proof is in the pudding. We've now led the industry in domestic PRASM growth three years in a row. That cannot happen by accident. United Next was a great strategy, but a great strategy only works with great execution. And that has allowed us to structurally and permanently change our position within the industry. And while we are proud of our relative outperformance to the industry, we also know that our absolute results are all that really matter. They're solid right now, but I can already see the impact that the schedule changes are having on our advanced bookings and yields as we hit the mid-August industry capacity inflection point. And we are absolutely committed to our no excuses philosophy and controlling what we can to hit our guidance. And so, while the industry is developing as we expected and our relative results are outperforming as we expected, we are not going to rely just on industry changes outside of our immediate control. We're also taking steps in the short term to ensure that we meet our targets. That includes aggressive cost management and reducing domestic capacity 300 basis points in the fourth quarter. The industry rationalization that we expected is beginning to play out, and we've reached the inflection point. The United Next plan continues to be the winning strategy for United, and as a result, we continue to expect to be within our full year 2024 EPS guidance range of $9 to $11, despite the tough industry environment around us. And with that, I'll hand it over to Brett.