Wheels Up at Bank of America Conference: Strategic Moves and Modernization

On Thursday, 15 May 2025, Wheels Up Experience Inc (NYSE:UP) presented its strategic vision at the Bank of America Industrials, Transportation & Airlines Key Leaders Conference 2025. CEO George Matson highlighted the company’s transformation through fleet modernization, operational improvements, and a strategic partnership with Delta Air Lines. Despite challenges, Wheels Up aims to redefine private aviation with a focus on customer experience and flexibility.

Key Takeaways

• Wheels Up is modernizing its fleet with Phenom 300 and Challenger 300/350 aircraft.
• The partnership with Delta Air Lines is central to Wheels Up’s international strategy.
• Corporate segment growth now represents 40% of the business.
• Operational improvements have led to an 80% reduction in EBITDA loss.
• Wheels Up aims to integrate commercial and private aviation seamlessly.

Operational Updates

• Fleet Modernization: Wheels Up is replacing its legacy fleet with Phenom 300 and Challenger 300/350 aircraft, aiming to improve unit economics and reliability. The modernization is about 25% complete, with the acquisition of Grand View Aviation adding 17 Phenom aircraft.
• Operational Excellence: A new central operations center, inspired by Delta’s model, is enhancing performance metrics. The on-time performance rate is in the high 80s to 90s, with utilization of the legacy fleet up by 32%.
• Financial Improvements: Contribution margins have expanded from 1% to 19%, and EBITDA loss has been reduced by 80%, with an additional 50% reduction in the first quarter of this year.

Future Outlook

• Partnership with Delta: Wheels Up’s collaboration with Delta aims to provide a global aviation solution, integrating commercial and private options. A pilot program in five major European leisure destinations has generated significant interest.
• Corporate Segment Growth: The corporate segment has grown to account for 40% of Wheels Up’s business, with Delta’s 45,000+ corporate customers being a key driver.
• Customer Experience: Wheels Up is focused on delivering a seamless travel experience, with digital platforms enabling customers to choose between commercial and private travel options.

Q&A Highlights

• Pilot Sourcing: Wheels Up sources pilots from private aviation enthusiasts, general aviation, and retirees from mainline carriers.
• Customer-Centric Approach: CEO George Matson emphasized breaking down barriers to make private aviation more accessible and flexible for customers.

In conclusion, Wheels Up’s strategic initiatives and partnership with Delta are paving the way for a redefined private aviation experience. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bank of America Industrials, Transportation & Airlines Key Leaders Conference 2025:

Andrew, Interviewer: Moving on to our next chat is with, George Matson. He is the CEO of Wheels Up. George has been with Wheels Up for about eighteen months or so now. And Six quarters. Six quarters.

There you go. You’re not counting. And George has been was on the Delta board of directors for about eleven years, so has certainly a deep background in overall commercial aviation. Maybe open it up to George when he would kind of give a give an overview of, you know, just what Wheels Up is and kind of your vision for the for the company, you know, as you’ve been there, you know, since you’ve gotten to the firm.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Great. Thank you, Andrew, and and and thanks for joining us everybody today. So starting with the basics, Wheels Up is the fourth largest private aviation company in the industry. It was started about twelve years ago and very quickly grew to be one of the leaders in private aviation. We’re the largest on demand provider of private aviation.

When you think about the private aviation industry, the vast majority of private aviation aircraft are still wholly owned. About three quarters, 70 of all aircraft are still wholly owned. And then within the segment of that are operated, the largest model is the fractional model, which is NetJets and Flexjet. And then there are two on demand operators, Us and Us and VistaJet, who who provide a programmatic membership and or charter offering, and we’re and and that’s what we we do. As Andrew mentioned, was on the board of Delta for eleven years.

Prior to that, I spent twenty years at Goldman Sachs where among my responsibilities, I was responsible for the transportation sector and spent more time aviation through those years. But but the fundamental idea of what we’re doing on the back of Delta’s investment into the company in February. In September of twenty three, Delta, who had sold their private jet business to Wheels Up earlier in in early two thousand twenty right before the pandemic, made a second investment into Wheels Up, and I stepped off the board to run the company. And and this investment was was was quite different in its in its intentions. The idea behind what we’re doing and what we launched into late in 2023 was to really for the first time integrate and merge the capabilities of a premium commercial carrier with a private aviation carrier and to offer a seamless commercial offering to customers across those two ecosystems that had always existed entirely separately.

And really to approach private aviation, I think differently than it’s been approached in the past. It’s been an industry which I think has been fairly short on innovation. As I said, the fractional model has really been the dominant model, which is kind of a timeshare approach to private aviation. And and we’re really trying to build a solutions platform that spans not only across private and commercial aviation, which is how most people travel across both, those who can access private aviation, but within private solutions that span on fleet, off fleet, domestic, global, and hybrid travel with Delta as well. So that’s what we’re building, and it’s quite distinctive, I think, from the other models in the industry.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the value proposition of your kind of on demand model versus the fractional model and the benefits that it gives to consumers?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So the whole idea of what we’re trying to do is provide the most customer centric accessible solutions. So knock down the barriers to entry that have prevented people from accessing private aviation who otherwise could afford to. You know, a study was done few years ago that suggested that 90% of people who can afford to fly private have never flown private. And whether the number is 90% or some other large number, I think we can all agree that that it’s an industry that could be bigger based on folks who could afford to be part of it.

So you ask yourself, well, why is that? And I think the why is we ask yourself two questions. Where are they? And I think a lot of them are at the front of the cabinet at Delta and elsewhere. But then you ask yourself another question, which is why is that?

And I think it’s because the industry has not done a great job of providing accessible, flexible solutions to allow people to access private aviation. And so our approach is to lower those barriers, to give the tools to the customer, to choose their mode of travel each flight, not for every flight, not always on the same aircraft, not with long term capital commitments. And so basically, Andrew, our offering consists of two options. Basically, join up or join Wheels Up through a membership programmatic offering in The US that’s supported by our fleet of approximately 150 aircraft, gives you guaranteed availability, assurances around pricing and you’re a member. Or you can be a global charter customer.

One of the businesses that Wheels Up acquired three years ago, which really changed our footprint, was one of the largest global providers of private charter brokerage. And so we have a global footprint in charter brokerage, which is as large in fact as our membership business. Most people don’t know that. And so whether a customer wants to come to us as a member, where we really try to lower the barriers to entry, a modest membership fee, put some money on deposit, the money doesn’t expire, fly more, fly less, fly the aircraft you thought you’d fly, whatever you want to fly for each trip or be a charter customer. Use us ad hoc when you want to.

And then of course, the third pillar is Delta. So the way we think about it is we’re offering global aviation solutions spanning across commercial and private through those three fulfillment pillars, one of which is Delta.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. I what I’ve found interesting about your business model that I I wasn’t aware of is the international component. Right? Like, unlike a commercial airline where you have to switch carriers when, say, you get to Europe, you have optionality for your consumers if they fly into a bigger market to get into some of those smaller markets. Dave, touch upon that a little bit.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So first of all, as I mentioned, we had the capability to address any customer need on fleet or off fleet anywhere in the world. I mean examples of recent trips that come to mind, Dubai to Gabon, Botswana, a trip the other day that we fulfilled, a trip from Teterboro to Geneva to Tokyo and back to Teterboro. That wasn’t on our aircraft, but that’s a trip that we put together for our customers. But to your question about international travel, this is where I think the connection with Delta becomes really interesting and the whole idea of last mile, first mile connectivity with Delta.

So, you know, the end state of where we wanna go is that when you type in an itinerary, a city that might not even be in Delta’s network, you’ll get a set If you’re one of those customers whose profile suggests you can fly across both of our systems, where you’ll get a purely commercial option, you’ll get a purely private option perhaps, and you’ll get a hybrid option. So take an example, you know, Pittsburgh to Dubrovnik, right? You might get purely commercial with two or three connections, an airline partner of Delta’s in Europe to get you to Dubrovnik. You might get a private option from Pittsburgh to JFK, down a set of stairs into a car to Delta At the other endpoint, maybe you get Athens Dubrovnik, commercial.

These are the things we’re working on. And in fact, this summer with Delta, in cooperation with Delta, we put in place a pilot of this basically where we focused on five of the largest leisure destinations in Europe, Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Nice, and Naples. And if you buy a Delta one ticket on delta.com, you will get a banner or a push notification that says if Athens isn’t your final destination and you want to fly privately on wheels up to your final destination, click here. We’re getting thousands and thousands and thousands of searches and inquiries about that. And for us this year, it’s less about how many flights we book because if you really think about what we’re doing, we’re reeducating how customers are thinking about their travel options.

I think that customers have been taught to think about these modalities in separate silos. And we’re trying to meld those silos together and get people to start thinking about how to optimize their travel solution relative to their economic parameters in the most optimal way for them. And they define that, not as the company defines that, but as they define that. And the economics of this are interesting too. If you’re flying to Athens in the middle of summer, high season on Delta one with your family of five or six, that can be a, I don’t know, $40.50, $60,000 cost.

The incremental cost of an hour on a private jet to not deal with all the rigmarole of transit and all that, it’s gonna be not multiples of your commercial aviation cost. It’s gonna be a fraction of your commercial aviation cost. And that’s an upside down way of thinking about these economics. But if you start trying to optimize these things for for customers and really give the customers the tools to select what works for them, and that’s the education process we’re doing with these folks that we’re dealing with in these five cities. And the end state, of course, is there won’t be five cities, it’ll be every city.

And for Delta, I think when you start thinking about the premium journey and unlocking people’s imagination around travel, now Delta’s vast network, global network becomes an infinite global network, right? Anywhere there’s an airport is the answer to where you can go. It was interesting when we started working on the marketing for this with Delta, the original sort of concepts were looking at the big travel lanes from the big gateways, right? So pick Athens. You know, was it was conversations about, you know, Mykonos and Santorini and the places folks would go from Athens.

But, you know, we actually turned that around and said, no. No. Athens is a dot, and there’s a radius circle around Athens. And, you know, your your destination is only limited by your imagination. Right?

Go to the next undiscovered place. Go to the place that’s the next next place. You can’t really get there commercially or certainly can’t get there easily. And so those are some of the narratives around how we’re positioning this. On the leisure side that we’ve been talking about, there’s also obviously a very important corporate element for our strategy as well.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. I know it’s incredibly early and you’re just rolling out some of these initiatives, but are you seeing any early success this this summer? Right? We hear about you continue to hear about strong transatlantic travel. Anything you’d talk about there?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. Look, I think we’re seeing very good early success in interest level and how we’re positioning this. And as I mentioned, thousands and thousands of queries and inquiries. You think about the scale too, right? I mean, Wheels Up today has about 10,000 customers, about 5,000 active members and about 5,000 active charter customers.

And you think about Delta Airlines, right? 20,000,000 active SkyMiles members. Half a percent of those folks, let’s just say, could access private aviation. That’s a hundred thousand people. You you think about these five cities.

There are six digit numbers of people in Delta one going to these cities. And so and so there’s a huge addressable market, and we’re seeing early signs of interest. I would say it’s too early to talk about results. But when you think about the broader Delta partnership across their ecosystem and in corporate, we’ve been at the corporate thing a bit longer over these last eighteen months. New corporate in partnership with Delta is our fastest growing segment now.

It comprises about 40% of our business. And if you think about where Wheels Up started, those who know the history of the company, it was much more of a leisure centric business model and we’re going much more balanced between leisure and corporate. And the Delta corporate opportunity for us, they have 45,000 plus corporate customers, is a big opportunity.

Andrew, Interviewer: Yes. Got it. Just curious, the booking curve for your products, how does it relate relative to say, a Delta booking curve?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So look. One of the things that folks pay for when they access private aviation is the flexibility to make last minute plans. So our booking curve tends to be closer in. People do book, some weeks and months in advance in some cases.

But basically, what we offer our customers is guaranteed availability 48 out. And so the bulk of our bookings come in a few a week to three weeks, four weeks the flight. It builds kind of up to that forty eight hour moment when we build our schedule for that day. It’s a smaller business than a lot of the commercial folks that you cover, Andrew, but it’s a pretty complex business. Right? Mean,

Andrew, Interviewer: I

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: sometimes joke with some of my friends in the commercial space that it must be nice to know that tail XYZ is going to be going from Kansas City to, let’s say, Atlanta at 10:00 three hundred days from now. I don’t know where things are going tomorrow and if it’s dynamic. My customers create our network and our schedule for the day. And so we have to be nimble. We have to be very adept operationally to deal with that complexity.

And those are some of the, I think, things we’ve brought to this company over these last eighteen months as we’ve really focused on operational excellence on the back of Delta’s capabilities there candidly and bringing some new ways of doing things to private aviation operationally.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. How do you measure that operational success? I’m sure completion factor. Just curious how that has evolved over the that kind of time you’ve been there.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So I think one of the most look, Wheels Up one point zero did a tremendous job of becoming very relevant in private aviation very quickly, grew very quickly, became a very well recognized brand, grew even faster through COVID and developed a lot of operational complexity that they weren’t really prepared to manage. One of the most important things that we started to focus on, not when I got there and when Delta made its investment a year and a half ago, but about a year before that Delta started to help in this regard, was shoring up the operation. So what we did is we decided we were going to build a central operations center in Chamblee, just North of Buckhead in Atlanta, down the road from Delta. It’s actually a replica just about of the OCC at Delta.

It happens to be run by Dave Holtz, my COO, who ran the OCC at Delta for ten years, knows a little something about operations. And, you know, day one when I came in here, I set out the goal that we were gonna be the best run private aviation company in the industry and that we’re gonna follow the Delta playbook to do it. And we began disclosing operational stats day one, even though we’re not obligated to like the commercial folks are in private aviation because I thought it was important customers understand where we were and that we were transparent on that journey. So we started disclosing completion rate in d 60, which is our on time measure. We don’t measure it when the door closes.

We measure it when, no pun intended, we’re wheels up. And so we sit at about 98%, ninety nine % completion rate on any given day, and we sit at about 90%, high eighties to 90% on time. We obviously build in a little block time, so we’re better than that on arrival. But I invited everyone else in the industry when we started doing this on my first quarterly call, and I’ve kept doing it to join us and sharing their stats. Don’t know, it hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe it’ll happen soon. We’re holding ourselves to account on that stuff. And look, you can’t be good at this if you’re not really good operationally. And people are paying a lot of money to buy back their time. And if you fail on that, you failed.

And that’s really the mantra. I moved the headquarters day one from New York, the New York sales office, if you want call it that, to the op center. I sit in the op center. We all sit in the op center and that’s where we run the company from. It’s where it should be run from.

And so that’s kind of the mindset shift that we’ve that we’ve gone through. You know, the other interesting thing, we started measuring another borrow from Delta as brand days. So, you know, I remember back on the board of Delta in the early two thousand tens, if you had said in a Delta meeting, hey, could we ever have a day with like no cancellations? People would have given you the 20 reasons why that’s impossible statistically. And then, you know, we had one and then we had five and then, you know, two couple of hundred.

Right? And so we started measuring brand days and, you know, we went from like none to I think we had almost ninety, eighty eight or 87 brand days last year. So it’s the same journey. It’s continuous improvement. It’s the little things that matter in this business and that’s a lot of what our team is focused on.

Look, we brought over some great people. I mentioned Dave Holtz. About 80% of our operations leadership is new. A lot of those folks came from Delta, not all, in operations, in the commercial space, revenue management, scheduling, etcetera. And then I brought in some great people from elsewhere, Really strong team.

So you’re making a lot

Andrew, Interviewer: of changes at Wheels Up. I think maybe changing gears a little bit and if maybe we could take a step back and maybe speak a little bit about the history of Wheels Up, particularly from a fleet perspective? Because fleet is another aspect that you’re changing pretty dramatically here. So if you can talk about how they operated and the fleet they operated with maybe pre pandemic into the growth that they had during the pandemic and kind of your initiatives now.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So the the the original fleet platform of the company was the was the King Air, and it was short distance. It was leisure flying.

It was a it was a membership product. Over time, before we got here, they added jets to their fleet and sort of snapped the picture when we started this a year and a half ago. We were about two thirds jets, one third King Airs. It was a jet fleet that we quickly realized we were going to need to replace. And we built in the first couple of quarters I was there a three year plan that was supported by a fleet plan that had us modernizing our jet fleet and replacing all of our jets by the February while reducing the size of our King Air fleet.

And so what we decided to do is replace our legacy fleet of Parker four hundred and Citation CJ3 light jets, Citation XL, XLS mid sized jets and Citation X super mid sized jets with two platforms. The Phenon 300, which is a premium light jet that really spans across the capabilities of the mid sized category as well. And then the Challenger 300, three 50 in the super mid category. So we announced that at NBOA in October of last year, a year into this. We announced the acquisition of the largest operator of Phenoms on demand in the industry, a company called Grand View Aviation, which jump started us with 17 aircraft right away.

And we’ve been replacing aircraft steadily ever since. We’re about 25% of the way through modernization, Andrew. And what that fleet modernization does is a couple of things. One is it really changes the unit economics of our business. We concluded pretty quickly that with the legacy fleet we had, utility we could put on that fleet, the reliability, the unit economics, we were going to be capped at where we could go.

So we needed to do that. Second thing it does is it really repositions us in the market, I would say from more of a value positioning to a premium positioning. These are best in class aircraft. We didn’t choose these aircraft casually. The Embraer Phenom 300 is the leading private premium light jet in the industry.

It has been for a dozen years. It’s close to 1,000 copies out there. It’s the go to aircraft for corporate flight departments. And equally, the Challenger 300, three 50 from Bombardier is also the leading aircraft in that category. These are also the aircraft that are being flown by some of my biggest competitors.

And I kind of wanted to take the conversation about plane a versus plane b off the table and let’s just focus on the model. Let’s focus on whether you’d rather have an accessible customer centric model or whether you’d rather have a rigid, cumbersome model that you’re trying to access travel through. And we think we’re going to succeed in articulating the merits of that. But that fleet process is already underway. We did a couple of customer events this week on Monday in Palm Beach and on Tuesday in Atlanta showcasing our new aircraft and very strong, very strong Very good response.

So very different product than what Wheels Up has been associated with up until this point. And it’s now out in the marketplace. We’re branding those aircraft. We’re standardizing the interiors. We’re putting satellite Wi Fi on those aircraft.

And we’re buying these aircraft, I would say, kind of mid early to mid cycle. We’re not buying new aircraft. There’s big enough secondary markets for these aircraft that we’re able to buy seven, ten year old aircraft. And then this is also a little bit the Delta playbook, Sure. Invest into those aircraft where needed with and standardize the branding to where from a customer perspective, it’s a really elevated product.

Andrew, Interviewer: I guess I’m not as familiar with this, but what is the average life of a private aircraft?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Oh, thirty plus years. Thirty plus years. Okay.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: I mean, as with most aircraft, the depreciation curves were pretty steep at the front end and then and then flattens out. And so we’re we’re looking at this economically also. I mean, we’re building a fleet quickly, even if we did want to put in new orders, we’d be waiting two or three years to get them. But what we like about our model is we’re building an early life, very reliable, best in class fleet. The reliability performance stats on these airplanes are best in class.

And you contrast that to other models and you sort of you buy a share of a new aircraft, but then you actually end up flying on a fleet of used aircraft, which seems a little backwards. We’d rather buy seven to ten year old aircraft, put our customers on those aircraft, have maybe much lower acquisition costs, you know, $50 on the dollar kind of thing. Okay. And be able to pass some of those economics on to our customers and better pricing.

Andrew, Interviewer: What are the CapEx needs of your refleeting initiative?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: So we have a plan that has us basically funded to accomplish the entire need between a mix of owned and leased aircraft over the next three years. We recapitalized or refinanced our balance sheet in October when we announced the Grand View acquisition with the help of Bank of America, thank you, with a facility that refinanced our existing fleet. It acquired the new 17 aircraft from Grand View and it provided reborrowing capacity to continue to buy aircraft as we sell aircraft because we’re selling aircraft as we’re buying aircraft. And so when you look at the net CapEx need, have that covered with our current funding.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. Operationally, what do you view as your biggest challenges?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yes. So look, our biggest challenges, looking in the rearview mirror, have been operating this legacy fleet that wasn’t fundamentally reliable enough to meet our goals. And I think the team did a great job doing that a lot better. I mean, I really am proud of some of the short term wins we had when we came in here. I mean, starting from October of twenty twenty three, we really focused on performance and saw significant improvements in maintenance availability, all the operating stats, and drove significant improvement with that legacy fleet.

If you look at last year on relatively flat revenues, we started to grow again in the fourth quarter and we grew again in the first quarter. But on relatively flat revenues, we expanded our contribution margin by 19 percentage points from basically 1% to 19%. And we did that on that legacy fleet. We drove utilization up 32%. We just operated better.

So the challenges of that legacy fleet will eventually be behind us. Right now, we’re in the midst of a fleet transition. So as my ops team likes to remind me, we’re going from four jet types to two, but on the way to two, we’re going to six. So we’re kind of juggling a little bit and there’s a lot of execution involved in that. But we’ve got the right people on board to manage that.

Look, going forward, we just want to continue to elevate what customers expect, right? We’ve put in place some resources really focused on all aspects of the customer experience, right? It’s nice to talk about the planes and this plane versus that plane and all of them, how they feel and look inside. And that’s an important part of the customer experience. But there’s hundreds of touch points as you know with customers in this industry, whether it’s commercial or private aviation.

And we’re looking at that total experience now foundationally supported by a great product. But there’s a myriad of places we can continue to improve. But we’re on a journey where we’re now actually measuring looking and thinking, how are we interfacing with customers on the front end and when they’re prospects? What happens when you become a member? What is your billing look like?

What is your renewal process? What’s the preflight? What’s the inflight? How are the pilots presenting? What does the safety brief sound like?

We’re looking at all the tiny things that matter and aggregate into a total experience.

Andrew, Interviewer: Got it. I do see some pilots in the room, so I wanted to ask you how, like, how you source pilots for the operation?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: So our pilot core, which is a tremendous asset of our company, they are the front face. I mean, in commercial aviation, these folks are the people interfacing in every way with the customer around flight from greeting to bags to problem solving to obviously operating the aircraft safely every time. But we source pilots from basically, I say three places, Andrew. One, there’s a cadre of folks who just fly privately, private jet aircraft and always want to. They’re not coming from anywhere.

They’re not going anywhere. They they like flying private aviation aircraft. They like some of the lifestyle aspects of that, allowing them to predict schedules better or not, you know, live where they want, etcetera. The customer interface piece is a big part of that. I’d say about a third of our folks are coming up through general aviation on their way to commercial aviation, and we’re a stop on that journey.

And we have pathways for those folks to end up in Denver and Delta and other places. And then we have folks who retire out of the main lines and have a few more years they can fly. And we have a lot of those folks from Delta and and other places as well, United and and all the mainline carriers, and and they love it. So, you know, you could be sitting there in one of our planes with a a a captain who, you know, a few months ago was flying a triple seven or, you know, some other big airplane for for the commercial folks. Interesting.

Andrew, Interviewer: You definitely have a good kind of long term vision for for Wheels Up. If I were you know, if you were to look five, ten years down the road, what would you view as kind of the ideal relationship between Wheels Up and Delta? Yeah. So

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: look, I think that what we’re so excited about is this idea that we are in a long term indefinite strategic partnership to transform private aviation and aviation in the process. And look, think Delta speaks to this themselves when they talk about it, but they view this as an integrated part of their premium commercial offering. This is not a financial investment. This wasn’t sort of a rescue of a company that needed some help. This is now viewed this sort of second investment into Wheels Up is viewed as an integrated part of Delta’s premium commercial offering.

We’re going to market together. We’re going to market together as we face Delta’s forty five thousand plus corporate customers, as we face the subset of their individual customers for whom this is relevant. And I think Delta views this the same way they view their other integrated JV partnerships with the international carriers that they have. And I think Delta has taken a different approach to that than some of their competitors in the industry. And so what do I see twenty years from now?

I see a seamlessly integrated offering between us and Delta that customers can access digitally and in every other way to choose their optimal mode of travel between us, Delta and hybrids of the two here in The US and around the world. That’s where we want to go. Great.

Andrew, Interviewer: Any questions in we have a question in the audience? Yeah.

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yes. Yes. So what we’ve been using is what most people have been using before satellite WiFi became available in private aviation, which is really only happening now. It’s rolling out kind of real time, and the two major providers are Gogo and Starlink. But we’ve been using the traditional air to ground systems that Gogo in private aviation offers.

And there’s various levels, L1, L3, L5. And we have different versions on different aircraft of ours. But we’re going to standardize that on the Gogo Galileo HDX system, which is supported by OneWeb as the satellite communications provider. We ran a robust process. We talked to obviously all the folks who could offer something.

We looked at the capabilities of those systems. We looked at the cost of those systems. We looked at the availability of those systems on our particular aircraft types, getting STCs and so forth, and entered into, I think, really good agreement with Gogo to support our transition, which is starting this summer of putting satellite WiFi on aircraft. Not being well connected on a private aviation aircraft is no longer acceptable, right? These things are supposed to be productivity tools.

They’re supposed to be traveling boardrooms. You’re meeting with your you’re on there with your your management team and so and so forth, and you need to And so you’re going to see a really significant improvement as these systems roll out, not only for us, but other folks who are also employing these systems and other ones in the marketplace and the capability on these aircraft to do live video, Zoom calls, telephone calls. I mean, it’s all gonna be very different than what people are familiar with today with the legacy systems. Sure.

Andrew, Interviewer: Any other questions from the audience? I guess one last one for me, just a couple of minutes left. So you’ve been at Wheels Up for eighteen months. You’ve gotten the operation, improve the operation, getting through the refleeting initiatives, starting to meet with, you know, with investors now. So Yep.

I guess two questions. One, what are the, you know, two to three things you want to instill in the investor community? And I guess second question, from the meetings that you’ve had so far, what do you think is the biggest misperception of bills up out there?

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So look, on on the first question, Andrew, I I would say that we’re in the early innings, first, second inning of a multiyear transformation journey, right? This isn’t a turnaround to something that existed before. We’re doing some things that are new and different, two wheels up, but new and different in aviation. And this whole idea of a solutions platform and really giving the customer the tools to access it is new.

And I think it’s going to bring people, new people into private aviation. I think it’s going to also shift concentration or share between legacy models and this new approach. I think the opportunities we have with Delta are powerful and will be very meaningful for Wheels Up as we continue through this journey. And look, financial side, in year one, we made a lot of improvement, right? We sort of shored up who our core customer was.

We started to grow again, as I mentioned. We expanded our contribution margins by 19 points. We reduced our EBITDA loss by 80% and then another 50% in the first quarter of this year. And so we’re on a journey. I would say those first eighteen, nineteen points of contribution margin improvement were operating better with what we had.

The next leg of that journey is the fleet transition. Yeah. And the unit economics of the fleet drive another very significant increment of profitability through our business that is going to be the next major driver of financial improvement as that fleet transition happens and gets us to a place where we believe we’re going to be sustainably profitable and earning an attractive return. I think the biggest misperception is just this is a well known company and what people know or think they know or remember is not exactly where we are today or where we’re going. So some of our discussions have to start with helping people understand what’s changed before you can even talk about what’s going to happen.

And so we’re getting that message out, people are responding well to it.

Andrew, Interviewer: Great. With that, I’ll leave it there. Thank you. For joining

George Matson, CEO, Wheels Up: us, Andrew. Appreciate the time. Thank you all.

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