United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to United Airlines Holdings earnings conference call for the first quarter 2026. My name is Regina and I will be your conference facilitator today. Following the initial remarks from management, we will open the lines for questions. At that time, if you'd like to ask a question, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. This call is being recorded and is copyrighted. Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed, or rebroadcast without the company's permission. Your participation implies your consent to our recording of this call. If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line. I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Christina Edwards, Managing Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Regina. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to United's first quarter 2026 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, which represent the company's current expectations and 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, and historical operational metrics will exclude pandemic years. Please refer to the related definitions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures at the end of our earnings release. Joining us today to discuss our results and outlook are Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby, President Brett Hart, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nsella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Mike Leskinen. We also have other members of the executive team on the line available for Q&A. And now I'd like to flip the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Christina, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to congratulate the United team on a strong first quarter. We're building the number one brand loyal airline in the world, and our financial results are indicative of the structural, permanent, and irreversible changes that have happened at United and across the industry. Our first quarter results are just the latest proof point in our strategy to build a decommoditized brand loyal airline that that's setting a new standard for what is possible for customers in air travel. We've proven that the winning strategy is to make travel easier and better for all customers. And while all of us at United are deservedly proud of the brand we've built, we aspire to go farther, and we want to set a new, higher standard by revolutionizing air travel for our customers. More immediately, of course, we're managing through the impact of jet fuel prices that have doubled. Industry stress events seem to happen every five to six years. While we didn't know exactly what or when it would be, We knew something would happen. The best thing we could do was to prepare United in advance. To that end, we have, one, tripled our cash balance, two, moved to the top of the industry and profit margins, and three, strengthened our balance sheet. In fact, we ended 2025 with our highest credit rating in almost three decades. Advanced preparation allows us to stay focused on the long term while making near-term tactical adjustments to account for elevated fuel prices. At the moment, our goal is to do whatever it takes to recover 100% of the increase in jet fuel prices as quickly as possible and to achieve double-digit pre-tax margins next year. Oil is incredibly volatile right now, but because we think we're moving towards 100% pass-through, it allows us to have confidence in both our near and medium-term earnings trajectory, enough so that we can still provide guidance. For United, here's how we're thinking about our goals to get to 100% pass-through and achievement. Double-digit margins in 2027. One, to recover 100% of fuel costs, yields need to increase by about 15% to 20%, and we're assuming that fuel may remain higher for longer. Two, as yields increase, there will be an elasticity effect on demand that we're estimating will lead to less overall demand. Well, we haven't actually seen that decline yet. Econ 101 makes us believe it's coming. Three, less demand means that we should be supplying fewer seats to the market. For United, that means we're targeting capacity to be flat to up 2% for 3Q and 4Q on a year-over-year basis. It simply doesn't make sense to fly marginal flights that will lose cash in a higher fuel price environment. Mike will provide more details behind our 2026 outlook, but our view for 2027 is that we're targeting a pre-tax margin of at least 10%. We obviously have some time to see what happens, but if jet fuel remains elevated compared to our pre-world levels, as we think it might, we'd once again expect to require less capacity growth in 2027 than we were planning just two months ago. Realistically, there probably isn't enough time to make up 100% of the fuel price increase this year, but I feel very good about 100% recovery and getting to double-digit margins in 2027. And because we've positioned United for success, we can make tactical adjustments to manage what we need to in the short term while also staying focused on our long-term plan. I'm also more convinced than ever that our decade-long strategy to build a great, brand-loyal airline that is obsessively focused on making travel easier and better for all customers is the winning strategy. Finally, we've got a lot of press coverage regarding consolidation rumors. We've not commented specifically on those reports and aren't going to start today. So you can ask me about it if you'd like, but you won't be getting anything new from me on it today. With that, I'll hand it over to Brett.