Sun Country Airlines, CEO, Jude Bricker at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2025

Transcript

Jude Bricker:As a philosophy, we want to have an airline that can survive all these uncertain times. And we came through COVID as the best-performing airline in the US, and that's because we have a diversified model. If I could have the perfect airline, it would be one that had guaranteed revenue offsetting its fixed costs so that I could take my scheduled service capacity to whatever level it needed to be in order to be profitable in that given unpredictable environment. It's probably not ever going to happen. We can't get that close, but we've been able to do better than any other carrier. So I think the innovation that Sun Country brings to the market is that we think about capacity from a zero basis. So we'd say, okay, what's the best thing at this moment in time for this airplane to do? Second best thing, third, until we run out of airplanes or things to do. If we run out of things to do, the rest of the fleet's grounded. If we run out of airplanes, then we're done. And that's just a different philosophy about scheduling. Most airlines optimize a day and then repeat that day 365 times and then make tweaks to the day based on seasons or whatever. And Sun Country, every day is different from every other day. Well, actually, we're going to be cutting scheduled service capacity because we're growing our cargo business. We'll probably be flat and we'll probably be flat in charters, not because of demand, but just because we're growing block hours by 10%. That's a function of how quickly we can train crews into their seats. And, and I think as a result, We're going to meet the requirement for our cargo growth and then we're going to schedule whatever we can and then we're going to do whatever charters are available. I think probably, you know, as I mentioned, we're going to grow cargo, we're going to shrink sched, and I think charters are probably going to be around flat. We had a strategy coming out of COVID We were, as I mentioned, the best performing airline in the US '22 and '23. So we took advantage of that outperformance and went out and bought some aircraft and engines. And that turned out to be a really good move, particularly today with asset values having done what they've done. Many of those deals were purchasing aircraft that were already on lease, and then we would take redelivery of them and put them into service. It had an ancillary benefit that we were taking 900s that have a substantial induction engineering challenge. And so we, we still have those airplanes out on lease. As you mentioned, it's going to be the fleet growth that we need for the next 3 years combined with our cargo growth. So we don't have to go out and buy another aircraft. And that's a great place to be in because aircraft are scarce and expensive in today's environment. Now, I think that probably is going to change. Demand's kind of settling down. The OEMs are starting to get production rates back to what they were pre-COVID. So I think we may see that loosen up a little bit, but I think we've done a nice job of bridging this period of tightness for aircraft.

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