Southwest Airlines Company

Good morning and welcome to the Southwest Airlines third quarter 2021 conference call. My name is Rocco and I will be moderating today's call. This call is being recorded and a replay will be available on southwest.com in the investor relations section. After today's prepared remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Ryan Martinez, Vice President of Investment Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Rocco, and thank you all for joining us today. In just a moment, we'll share some brief remarks and then open it up for Q&A. And on our call today, we have our Chairman of the Board and CEO, Gary Kelly, Executive Vice President and incoming CEO, Bob Jordan, Executive Vice President and CFO, Tammy Romo, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Watterson, and President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Vandiven. Just a few quick notes here. So first, we'll make forward-looking statements, which are based on our current expectations of future performance, and our actual results could differ substantially from those expectations. And second, we had a few special items in our first quarter results, which we excluded from our trends for non-GAAP purposes, and we will reference our non-GAAP results in our remarks today. So please see our press release on this morning and our IR website for more information on both topics. And just a reminder that we are hosting our Investor Day in New York on December the 8th. So stay tuned for more details on that and we will go ahead and get started. So Gary, over to you.

Brian, thank you very much and good morning everybody. Welcome to our third quarter 2021 earnings call. After five quarters of pandemic WE SAW A DRAMATIC RECOVERY IN TERMS OF PASSENGERS, FAIRS, AND REVENUES, AND OBVIOUSLY THAT WAS VERY ENCOURAGING. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EVEN BETTER BUT FOR THE DELTA VARIANT SURGE, WHICH BEGAN TO AFFECT US IN EARLY AUGUST. OF COURSE, THE BOUNCE IN REVENUES CAME WITH A LOT OF BUMPS IN THE OPERATION, THOUGH, AS OUR HISTORIC STAFFING MODELS LEFT US SHORT AND CAUSED US TO MISS OUR RELIABILITY PLAN FOR THE QUARTER. required immediate attention and action for future schedules, which we have taken. So I would be the first to admit that things are messy. It is also very encouraging to see the earnings potential, and especially considering that business travel is far from recovered to 2019 levels, and our capacity is not fully restored with 24 airplanes still sitting on the ground. It also illustrates that this virus and its effect on our business can be unpredictable and volatile. And the burden to manage through all of this falls to our people. And we've gone from not enough to do to too much to do in a very short period of time. And as a perspective, of course, I think we'd all take the latter scenario any day. It has been a huge challenge for our people. So I want to thank them. They are warriors. They have performed exceptionally well, and especially considering the challenging circumstances. I am very proud of them, and they remain and always will be my top priority. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our incoming CEO, Mr. Bob Jordan, who will give us a quick overview.