Avelo Airlines, Founder & CEO, Andrew Levy at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2026

Transcript

Andrew Levy:I think we're really well positioned. I'm very excited about where we sit in the marketplace. Obviously, right now with extremely high fuel prices, it's going to take some time to adjust to that new reality. And we'll see. You know, the market certainly thinks fuel prices are going to come in, which would be a welcome change. But I'm very excited about where we are. We've pushed a lot of increase through to the consumer, but we're still not covering 100% of the increase in fuel expense. But we're getting closer and closer each month, and I'm I'm very confident we'll get there. But, you know, we'll see. Hopefully fuel— look, fuel— everybody thinks it's going to go down. You know, it can always go up too. So we'll see what comes our way. But we're comfortable with where we are. But certainly in the short term, it's a— you know, it's difficult when fuel prices run up as much as they have so quickly. I think demand is phenomenal. I think demand is really strong. I think the economy is really strong. Look, unemployment is very, very low. So despite the concerns about affordability, which are well-placed, and there's a lot of consumer sentiment reports that are very, you know, very pessimistic. The fact is though, with unemployment incredibly low, people are spending and people are certainly traveling. So I think this economy is very strong. I think it's got a lot of legs to it. So yeah, I think demand is gonna hold up very, very nicely. E2s start in the second, or excuse me, first half of 2028. So we'll start really flying them in our scheduled systems Probably in the summer of '28 is my expectation. So about 2 years from now. So we got a lot of 737 growth to go between now and then. 2028, we're going to start out with 6 and we're going to add— it'll be 6, 8, then 10, 10, 10, and then 6. So it'll take us a few years to bring it in, which is fine. We're just— we're excited to— we're excited to get going. But we have a lot of work to do between now and then. Like I said, we expect to add probably about another, call it 8 to 10 737-800s between now and then. So we have a lot of growth between now and then, but we'll be really excited to have the E2. The market is moving in our favor for sure. There's a lot of aircraft all of a sudden that are hitting the market. Combination of back to fuel, you know, it's putting a lot of pressure on airlines around the world, particularly in Asia and Europe. But I think the other thing that's happening is that as Boeing has continued to improve their production rates, GE is delivering engines. That is, is I think really a huge positive for NG prices because companies that have the MAX are taking the MAX, they're getting delivered. And with high fuel, they're less likely to take them as growth airplanes. They're more likely to take them as replacements. So that's letting airplanes back onto the market. So I think we've seen the peak of the market for -800 prices. And so I think we're going to see some prices moving our way, which we'll be really excited to see if that in turn turns out to be true.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.