要把 Starlink 装上每架飞机的航空公司CEO

I’m talking to people who say, “I’m switching to flying a regional flight because it’s got Starlink.” I was like, “Holy.” Free was never the value proposition. Fast is the value proposition, and there’s only one option for fast. It’s Starlink. That is the only option.

Scott Kirby took over United Airlines in May 2020 at the height of the pandemic. Refusing to play defense, he’s made massive bets on fleet expansion, premium seats, and Starlink Wi-Fi, creating differentiation in the hugely competitive airline market.

1. Going Big During The Downturn

You did a big fleet order during COVID that looked risky. Was it risky?

I didn’t think it was. Back during COVID, every single expert in the world said travel demand was going to be down by 50% forever. That’s what everyone said. One other point: You should ignore the experts outside of 2 sigma. In the tails, the experts are terrible.

I just thought they were all wrong. I thought COVID was going to be deep and last a long time, and then travel demand would recover. Everyone else around the globe was shrinking, so we did the exact opposite. Literally every global long-haul airline in the world, except for United, permanently retired part of its wide-body fleet. We looked at that and said, “We think the premise is wrong, and it’s just a huge opportunity to do the opposite”: do the biggest aircraft order in history, which we did.

I remember telling our board. When they asked, they said the same thing: “This seems like a really big risk. Everyone else is shrinking, and you’re going to do the biggest—”

How big was the order?

200 wide-bodies, and then we did another several hundred narrow-bodies.

Pretty big.

Those are airplanes that list for—we get a big discount, but they list for $400 million.

Sure.

I told our board, “This is one of those cases where, because everyone else is shrinking, we don’t have to be right. We just have to be not totally wrong.” It’s one of those situations where the odds are so stacked in your favor. People out here in Silicon Valley do this stuff all the time: figure out something you have a different view on than everyone else and go big on it. If it works, the returns are huge, and the downsides are smaller.

There’s been this cycle with large capital purchases. It’s also a tech story that’s relevant with memory. Samsung came to dominate memory by systematically investing into every downturn because it’s very cyclical. Obviously, that’s hugely beneficial today. The flip side is that everyone wants to invest when it’s at its peak. Have we gone full circle?

You want to invest when things are down and not invest when things are up. For us, and probably for memory, it’s a little harder because our assets are so long-lived. For us, our assets have a 30-year life. I guess for a chip factory, it’s less because the technology moves away, but it has a 30-year life. We’re going to go through several recessions, and we’re going to go through several ups and downs.

It’s a little harder to do that, but you get better terms, you get better deals. We got really good pricing, for example, during—

You’re the only person ordering airplanes.

Because we were the only one in the world. We relaunched the market. For Boeing, they could go to other customers and say, “Look, United believes. You should, too.”

I remember that period of people over-extrapolating COVID. It’s very striking. The tech version of that was companies deciding they were going to be fully remote forever. A lot of companies decided that, and then were like, “Wait a second. No, that’s not right.” Why were people so wrong on the travel side of things?

There are 2 things in human nature that are mistakes. One is to extrapolate the current situation into the future: assume that everything that’s happening today is going to continue into the future. The second is trusting people on surveys. Surveys are the absolute worst way to figure out what’s going to happen in the future.

The reason travel experts thought travel demand would be down was that they did surveys, and people were terrified. Everyone’s dying. You ask them, “Are you going to travel internationally again?” “No!” That was what they thought at the time. But once it was over, of course, they were going to go back to traveling again.

By the way, I said this earlier: Experts live in the world of 2 standard deviations. They force-fit everything into the things that they’ve already seen. When things happen outside 2 standard deviations, when the tails happen, that’s where you create all the value—

It’s famously in finance: The frequency of six-sigma events is—

That’s where I first started. VaR, Value at Risk, is the dumbest model in history. It’s stupid. Things that shouldn’t happen in the history of the universe happen once every 5 years because it’s a dumb, fundamentally flawed mathematical model that assumes everything is normally distributed. It’s not.

I had a debate when I was getting my master’s degree back in the ’90s. This was about Black-Scholes. They’re such a dumb model for valuing options because they assume a normal distribution. The world is not normally distributed. The tails are much fatter in everything that matters. Anyway, that applies to everything, but especially in a crisis.

Black-Scholes has a lot of “assume a spherical cow” assumptions baked into it. I love hearing you talk about the over-fixation on surveys. The travel industry, the airline industry, loves surveys. United probably surveys people up the wazoo.

Definitely at Stripe, we find we need to deprogram people a bit because in tech, people love running things via metrics, and you can outsource your thinking to the dashboards and metrics. We’re trying to encourage people to—yes, your opinions should survive contact with reality, but the metrics are not going to tell you what to do.

I like surveys for how people felt about stuff we’ve already done. I ignore surveys for what we’re going to do in the future.

Apple famously doesn’t do a lot of focus group testing on their products. They just build the products they want to build.

That’s the way. Today, we rolled out a Starlink tracker. I didn’t ask anyone about that. I sit on an airplane and talk to customers, and I know they’re going to think that’s cool. And they do think it’s cool.

Getting to the second thing, people try to over-measure tiny steps. It’s just like, “Do the Starlink tracker. If it’s that useful, whatever, it makes this better.”

Especially in a world of AI, you can do so much so fast. It’s really powerful. I have a different view of what we’re probably talking about, but I at least have a different view of where the value is going to be created in AI. You can just try so much so fast. Some of it doesn’t work, and people don’t care. I don’t need to do it.

It takes more time to do a survey or a focus group than to just do it. See if they like it. If they don’t, stop. If they do, do more of it.

How important is your ability to do these sorts of experimentation? We talked 8 months ago about redoing your whole tech stack so you could put these things on top of it.

I’ve always been a big believer in technology. I have a computer science degree.

You’re one of us.

Yeah. But 8 months ago, when I talked to you, I hadn’t yet had my AI epiphany. I’ve always wanted to get on modern platforms. During COVID, we did another thing: In the middle of COVID, we said, “When everyone else in airlines is cutting back on everything, we’re going to double down on technology investment.”

We started a several-hundred-million-dollar project to get not just onto the cloud, but to get everything off mainframes, build modern databases so we could access the data, and really modernize our tech stack. There was no ROI. There was no payback, which is why companies don’t do it. It’s really hard to do the ROI on something like that.

But what it does is enable you to move fast and do things. We’re doing stuff that other airlines, frankly, can’t do because they don’t have the right tech stack, and we can do it easily and fast. We started that in 2020 in an anticipatory way, and it’s really paying off today.

My AI epiphany happened within the last 8 months. I think AI summarizing documents and all that crap is ridiculous. “Summarize my day.” I can read my calendar. I don’t need to summarize my day. The power of programming. I hired a tutor and took three 1-hour sessions. If you want me to tell you what I did—

No, we want to see the vibe-coded app. Not out right now.

I’ll just tell you what the first thing I did was. I’ve always been into gambling, for better or worse, which helps you make big bets on aircraft, for example. After three 1-hour sessions, I got up on a Saturday morning, went down to the home gym, worked out, and took my laptop down there. I did it completely by myself. It took about 2.5 hours of run time, but I did a full workout. It takes time to run.

I do the exact same setup at my gym. I actually have an iPad with a keyboard there. In between sets, I’m just typing prompts, and it’s running. It’s perfect.

On my own, in 2.5 hours, I created a web page that had drop-down menus for what sport you want, what dates you want, what kind of bets you want—4 or 5 drop-downs. Then it would go to 4 sportsbooks, Kalshi being one of them—not actually a sportsbook—and pull up all the odds. You could just decide what you wanted to bet and put the dollar amount in.

And then it would go to whichever sportsbook had the best odds and make the bet on my behalf. I could do it with 3 hours of tutoring on my own, write a program to do that. It was an epiphany for me. I think I called our team that Saturday and said, “We’re all in on this.”

On that point, though, he did tell me when I asked him about it that they had this huge switchover coming the following week, and it went off without a hitch. I remember because I was actually flying the next day. You had warned me about it.

For that one, what we do is—I think I told you—we canceled several hundred flights that day, just in case something went wrong. We weren’t going to put customers in harm’s way. That was a switch from one of our biggest, most critical mainframe systems, which is tied into everything.

We felt really good about it. But those systems are so big and complicated: turning off a legacy mainframe system and turning on the new system. It did go off without a hitch, but we’d canceled several hundred flights. We just don’t schedule flights during that window, so in case something goes wrong, we’re not putting customers in harm’s way.

How much of the airline issues have been a story of outsourcing? You look at it, and sometimes what’s needed is some good de-vendorization and bringing the tech in-house. You look at why Tesla was so successful: they realized that software is important to cars, but the wing mirror and the wing mirror adjuster are made by the sub-vendor that does that, so you can’t centrally control it. You just need to own the tech stack. Have you guys been bringing more in-house?

We are.

Which subsystems in particular?

We’re bringing much more in-house. We have more in-house, I think, than any airline in the world. We’re the only airline in the world that owns our own reservation system. Everyone else has outsourced theirs to Sabre and Apollo.

You worked at Sabre, right?

I did. It wasn’t Sabre then; it was called American Airlines Decision Technologies. But that’s a mainframe system. We’re locked into it because of a legacy decision to own our own mainframe. Copa Airlines in Panama uses it too, because they’re a partner with us. We’re the only 2 airlines in the world that use it.

Eventually, EDS owned it, and then someone else did. They didn’t want to keep supporting it, so we had to support it on our own. But it’s been huge. Now we’re taking over all kinds of other parts of the tech stack, partly because we do things that are so much more complicated at United than at most airlines around the world.

Is that just because of the size, or what?

The size and complexity are just much higher. I’ll give you another example of something we’re taking over that I got so frustrated about: the seat-back entertainment screens. I didn’t actually realize it until I started complaining about the maps. The maps are terrible. I just want a map to show up. I’m into maps. I want to see where I’m going, and I want to be able to zoom in and out. The stupid map switches to the globe. I know approximately where I am on the globe. I don’t need to see the damn globe.

By the time you find the information you’re looking for, it switches screens.

What I want, though, is for you to already know who I am. You log in, my name’s there, and you put in my birthday or whatever. I do nothing but have the map on the whole time. I want to have my map preferences. Every time we go—

That’s so true.

“Oh, this is amazing.”

We’re taking over the map software from Panasonic. They’re taking over the whole software. There’s all kinds of stuff. One is, we’re going to know Ben likes the map, so it’s just going to come up. You can get to other stuff, but the map is just going to pop up on the screen.

Another one—these are little things—comes from this book, Unreasonable Hospitality. One of the things I took away from that book is to try to create memories for people. To me, this is another example of a cool thing: when you’re hitting your 2 million-mile mark, the screen is going to pop up with a little thing at the bottom and say, “Congratulations, Will.” It’s basically going to do a countdown, like—

Oh, that’s great.

1, 9, 9, 9, 9, 12, 13, and then a celebration.

The last 10, it should take over the whole cabin—

The flight attendants are going to know exactly when you hit 2 million, and we’ll be over the country. It’s a little thing, but it’s cool. We could never have done that unless we took over the software.

These surprise-and-delight product touches are quite important.

That’s another one: AI makes it possible to do things like that that wouldn’t have been possible before. We can know who you are and what you want to drink. Do you want a gin and tonic?

I want your excellent wine selection.

Do you want your Guinness? Well, I don’t think we have Guinness on the airplanes.

We’ll work on that.

I have a question about this surprise-and-delight thing, because that is a great thing. You show up, and United delivers something you didn’t expect. The question is: how do you handle that becoming a feature?

I was traveling this summer, and my flight was delayed out of Madison due to a maintenance issue. I thought, “It’s going to be super tight in Denver, but ConnectionSaver is going to save me.” The gates were next to each other, so I was totally relaxed about it.

Then I get there, and the flight had already closed. I walked to the gate. They’d closed it early. They’d taken off. If American Airlines does that, I don’t care; it’s my expectation. I was crushed because I’d already internalized it as, “You do this amazing thing.” You’re such a large airline—it’s hard to get into that.

We have to get really good at communicating about it. The seat-back screens are going to help, too. We’re going to tell you that and put it on the screen. The seat-back screen today is completely divorced from the app. Tomorrow, once we take it over, they’re going to be the same.

We’re not just going to text you about your flight; we’re going to text you and tell you exactly where it is. If something changes, what probably happened on that flight is it got delayed by air traffic control, and we didn’t have time to hold for it.

Oh no, it was one of those things where I understood the complexity of airlines. I was just looking at myself and thinking, “Why am I disappointed here?” I was like, “Oh, because—”

No, you should be disappointed, because what we should do is communicate with you really well about that. Another cool thing that I hope we’re going to have rolled out pretty soon—I’ve told them I want it done by Christmas for Christmas travel, because there’s usually weather at Christmas—is this: normally, if there’s a weather delay coming on one of your flights, all airlines, including United, send you a text that says, “Oh, there may be weather in Denver tomorrow.” Great. What are you supposed to do?

What can I do about that?

Cross your fingers?

Yes, it’s December in Denver. I’m aware.

Give you a little shot of anxiety before your trip.

What we’re doing today—it’s already started—is, when we say that, we give you other flight options you can switch to. You can stand by for this one if you want, or there are seats available on this one. What we’re going to do is send you the screen. It’s going to say, “Your flight to Denver—we estimate it has a 41% chance of being impacted by weather. If you switch to the earlier flight, it’s only 12%. The later flight is 3%.” That way, you can have some intelligence about making decisions.

But the point about how we keep wowing customers is a really important one. Two years ago, at the end-of-the-year officer meeting, I told our officers that their job is “wow.” They all looked at me like, “What the hell does that mean?” Our job is to do things that make a customer—especially a frequent flyer—get on the airplane and say, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before.” By the way, we get credit for that one time.

I know. That’s the challenge.

Then we owe them another “wow.” They should put that in the bank, and we should owe them. It’s a culture that means you can’t ever rest. You can’t be complacent. What are you doing that’s new, that’s cool? I want every cool thing we do to become something a customer takes for granted. You should take it for granted. We should surprise you in the future. That’s the culture we’re trying to create.

Ben has a theory that I like, which is that all of the top global airline lists are just totally missing the point. People talk about benchmaxxing in AI, where people are optimizing for the wrong things. All the top global airline lists feature heavily the Asian and Gulf airlines because they have really nice meals, very well-coiffed flight attendants, and all these things. Whereas what you actually care about is the airline having really good tech. You have things like ConnectionSaver, where it can rebook you if you—

I’m 100% with you. I think those airlines do a good job. I say schedule is the number one reason people pick an airline. But everything else matters for brand-loyal customers: service, product, reliability, and technology.

The Asian and Middle Eastern carriers do better than the U.S. airlines on product, for sure, and probably on service too. I think we do a really good job, but they have different cultures around service, so they do better on that. But I think technology is the differentiator.

United—that’s why I now believe United, in totality, is the best airline in the world. It’s because of technology. It’s getting exponentially better. Things like being able to do this for customers when there’s a delay and tell them what’s going on. We started it this summer. AI allows us to institutionalize this.

If you’re going to have a delay, send customers things like weather radar maps. In Chicago, there was a day when the weather was over the horizon, but you had to fly through this line of thunderstorms. It was sunny at the airport, but the routes were closed.

We were like, “Why? It looks fine outside. What’s the problem?”

We sent half the people the normal weather delay. They think you’re lying because it’s sunny outside: “You must be lying to me.” We sent the other half a picture with the radar map showing that you had to fly through this line of thunderstorms and the routes were closed because of that. For the people with a 1-hour delay, I think the numbers were negative 60 NPS with the normal way of sending it, and plus 60 when we sent a picture of the map. A 120-point difference.

It wasn’t just that they weren’t mad. They were actually happy. They were like, “Thank you for everything.”

It was better than an on-time flight. People can handle it. They understand that we don’t want to do something unsafe, but they don’t like uncertainty.

It sounds like a lot of what you’re describing is expectation management and communication.

Yes, 100%.

It’s a key part of the experience because this is high stakes for people.

I would leave expectation management out of it. It’s communication. People should expect that we’re going to get them—

I think it’s expectation management.

Why isn’t it expectation management?

Because I don’t want to use it as an excuse. It’s like, “Oh, sometimes weather happens, so you should expect it.” Our job is to try to—It does, but our job is to figure out how to make it the best possible for you.

I’ll give you another example with weather. This one, we’re going to have to get the FAA to help us, but we started running simulations with AI for Denver in the summer. In Denver, there are a lot of pop-up thunderstorms around the airport.

Denver is really your bête noire.

Well, no, it’s actually easier than the others. Newark is the hardest.

My two options for connecting are Chicago and Denver. It’s just a roll of the dice.

This will help Denver especially. Winter storms are actually pretty easy. You know what’s happening. Pop-up thunderstorms are what’s hard. If lightning strikes within 3 miles of the airport, the ramp closes for 30 minutes so people aren’t outside. That rule is dumb, first of all. If a storm is moving from east to west—or from west to east, which is what happens—and it happens west of the airport, you should probably close it. But if a storm is moving west to east and it happens 3 miles east of the airport, you don’t need to close it.

Using AI, what will happen is there’ll be a forecast in the afternoon that there are going to be thunderstorms. The FAA just takes the worst case. They don’t know where the thunderstorm will be, so they limit all the corner posts and proactively pull down the amount of traffic going through the airport. They take the worst case. But when you look at the data, sometimes the weather is to the southeast. In most cases, you can use different arrival and departure routes, but keep the airport running.

Because there’s nothing around Denver Airport, you have lots of space to work—

Yeah, and you can keep the airport running. We can probably reduce 50% to 75% of the weather-impacted delays in Denver in the summer by using this technology. It’s just transformational for customers.

That’s my point about expectation management. Instead of just saying, “Oh, weather”—at my previous employer, I told the operations team, “Anyone who says the word ‘weather’ in my presence is going to get fired, because I do not want to use weather as an excuse.” I know weather happens. I know we’re going to be safe, and we’re never going to do anything unsafe. But our job is to figure out how to minimize the impact of weather, and you can’t use weather as an excuse.

That’s my expectation management point. I want our culture to be, “We find ways to overcome the challenges.” Instead of trying to manage your expectations, we try to set high expectations and meet them. But we do communicate with you.

2. Air Traffic Control Limits Growth

What do you see as the biggest limiter of your business? Is it airport capacity? Is it airplanes?

No, it’s air traffic control. Air traffic control is 90% of the issue.

How do we finally modernize air traffic control? This is the great white whale. It’s a complex technical project and a complex social and political project. Can it be done?

It can be done. Look, the president is supportive. He’s the most pro-aviation president. He knows about aviation, and he likes talking about it. We have support from him. Secretary Duffy is great. I could text him right now and get a response. Unless he’s in a meeting or standing up speaking, I’d get a response within 30 seconds. Bryan Bedford is the best FAA administrator we’ve ever had. But it’s the government.

It’s just so hard for the government to do it. Take the appropriations process. These are the kinds of capital projects that take 5 to 10 years to get done. They do an annual appropriations process. They start at the beginning of the year. It’s often delayed because of government shutdowns. They may be starting 2 months into the fiscal year before the budget gets approved. Then they take 3 months to ramp up to start. Then they work for 4 months. Then they take the last 3 months to shut the project down because they don’t have authorization past 12 months. It is absurd.

Could the airlines fund it to get around the—

If they would let us. It’s super politically controversial to privatize the FAA and air traffic control. But it’s the kind of thing that private enterprise, I think, could get done in 2 to 3 years.

But you wouldn’t need to privatize it. You could just have a user-fee system where your—

It’s a user-fee system today. The real issue is that there are several political groups opposed to it. The biggest is private jets. Today, airlines pay 100% of the fees. The FAA is airline-funded. We pay 100%, and essentially, it’s free—99%. Essentially, it’s free to fly private jets. They’re a really powerful lobby, and I think that’s probably the biggest impediment to modernizing the FAA.

But the problem is, anything that’s done through the government—it’s like you go, and the government is just not efficient at that stuff. It is the best FAA and the best DOT we’ve ever had. But the conversations they have on Capitol Hill are, “Well, how many jobs are you going to put in my district?”

Think about air traffic control. Air traffic controllers don’t need to be at airports. They mostly sit in basements and look at screens. They can be in a centralized facility anywhere in the country. Instead, there’s an air traffic control facility in every single district for political reasons. It makes it incredibly inefficient. One wire gets cut, and if you’ve got one big facility, you get a backup.

As we saw.

You have 450 of them. Things happen all the time. It just makes the system inefficient. I’m not actually advocating for privatizing the FAA because it’s so politically toxic. But we’re doing more than we’ve ever done, and it’s going to be hard for the government to ever be leading-edge on this.

What will happen? Certain areas are already creaking at the seams capacity-wise, and air capacity grows 5% a year. We have an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

There are going to be fewer flights. It’s already happened in New York. The FAA has put limits on the number of flights in New York. It happened this summer in Chicago. It’s going to happen in more and more places.

That’s what we saw in San Francisco.

We hit the limit of what the FAA can manage, and then that becomes the limit. That’s the limiter. There’s more space in the sky, but you’ve got to have a different air traffic control system and process. They’re trying to modernize it. They are making good progress. I’m not trying to be totally negative. I’m not being negative. They’re making more progress than has ever been made in my career, but they’re never going to get to the—If the people at Stripe were allowed to run it, they’d really increase it.

More progress would happen.

A lot more progress would happen. If we were allowed to run it, more progress would happen because we’re not constrained by politics. They’re constrained by politics.

Scott has spoken about how some flights take longer today than they did 50 years ago, despite planes flying a lot faster, all because of a bottleneck with air traffic control. Stripe Economics recently looked at a similar paradox with AI. One study found that while AI can save workers 1.5 hours a week, those savings actually had little relationship with actual work output. It turns out making individual parts of the system faster doesn’t always make the whole system more productive. If you’re interested in these kind of topics, and you want to read more about AI and productivity or other research about the Internet economy, go to stripeconomics.com.

3. Why Hub Networks Matter

You said something at the Crain’s Chicago Business lunch in Chicago in August. You’ve had this battle royale with American Airlines. It’s very pertinent to me, since I fly to Chicago the most, where it would actually be better for consumers if United were the dominant airline.

I wouldn’t use the word “dominant,” but—

If you were the largest airline and had infinite capacity to expand, how is that? Is that just another articulation of the premium strategy—

No—

Because more routes are a benefit outside of cost?

It’s an understanding of how networks work. The real reason is there are a limited number of flights at Chicago. If you’re going to add one flight to Milwaukee from Chicago, that means you can’t fly somewhere else. It’s not the shortest flight, but it’s short.

For a hub to work, you need lots of what’s called catchment-area flying. United flies, I think, 8 times a day from Chicago to Milwaukee on small airplanes. People aren’t going from Milwaukee to Chicago and getting off the airplane. They’re connecting on to other destinations, and that’s really important.

We have several hundred of those catchment-area flights for connecting customers within a few hundred miles of Chicago. American has totally duplicative services on that. Those do nothing for the city of Chicago. They help support each of our 2 hubs.

The same exists in Atlanta and Dallas, by the way. Atlanta and Dallas are much smaller cities than Chicago, but they have more international service and more passengers. Every metric you look at, they’re bigger, and they drive more economic activity for Atlanta and Dallas. Single-hub airports drive more economic activity. The reason is they don’t have to waste several hundred of their flight possibilities on catchment-area flying. They have half as many.

Between you and American, there are, like, 16 flights a day.

They have half as many catchment-area flights. So what happens is, instead of having 16 flights a day to Milwaukee, you have 8 flights a day to Milwaukee on bigger airplanes, so you carry the same number of passengers, and you add an extra flight to Paris and an extra flight to Tokyo. You get more long-haul flying out of it.

I’m 100% sure Chicago should be the biggest airport in the world. It’s not because of this. I’m 100% sure it’s better for the city of Chicago. I think it’ll get you there. American’s going to lose probably $1.5 billion in Chicago this year. I think it’ll eventually get there.

How much is your— You famously were at American, were passed over, and came to United. How much is your competitive position versus American driving some of your comments, versus your past driving those comments? When are you going to actually start taking real aim at Delta? That’s the question we’re looking for.

Everyone thinks it’s personal for me. I get it.

Maybe a little bit.

But it really isn’t. In Chicago, it’s been a competitive battle. Look at our market share gains. In Chicago, we went from having lower market share than American to basically having double the revenue share. Those are unprecedented share shifts.

The market share shift we’ve had against Southwest in Denver is even bigger. The market share shift we’ve had against Southwest and Alaska combined here in the Bay Area is even bigger. It hasn’t been directed at them. With respect to Delta, I think what’s happening right now with Starlink is the biggest push.

That’s what we want to get to. Is Ed going to lose his job because he didn’t get Starlink?

He’s not going to lose his job over it. By the way, I have a lot of respect for Delta. I took inspiration from them. They were the first airline to start building brand loyalty. I don’t call it premium, because I want to invest nose to tail for a customer. Starlink applies to everyone. It’s not a premium product; it’s for everyone on the airplane.

They’ve done a lot of really good things. I think Starlink is the most important thing for customers choosing an airline now. Today, 48% of our flights are on Starlink. In the next week, it’s going to be up to 50%.

Way fewer than your seat miles, though. Why did you start on the little planes and not do the big ones first?

Because they were certified. This is the FAA process. You have to get the other airplanes certified. We’ve been getting them all certified. We’re doing about 3 airplanes a day. In fact, it’s going to go up by 2 points in a week and a half.

To this Asian airline point, you have a joint venture with ANA. Most people I know who fly over the Pacific often choose ANA flights. Now, of course, going forward, they’re going to choose the United flights because they’ve got Starlink.

Customers are going to try United because of Starlink. Then they’re going to realize the technology, in particular, is better than anything they’ve seen anywhere else in the world. We’re going to get customers who have been loyal to other airlines to try us for Starlink and stay because the technology is better.

With Starlink, we now have this moment where there’s real differentiation between airlines that were previously closer. The differentiation has gapped out. The fact that every airline has not chosen Starlink suggests to me that the economic deal for an airline wasn’t obviously, “Oh, yeah, we must do this.” There was a case you could have made not to do it, because some airlines didn’t. Can you talk us through how you made the decision to do it? How painful was the decision?

It wasn’t painful. I thought it would be a big deal to customers, so I wanted to do it. Yes, it’s more expensive, but it’s a whole lot better. You often get what you pay for, and that’s true in this case.

At airlines, you often look at these things as incremental. It really takes time to put them on. The easiest way is to do it during a heavy check. You have an airplane that’s going to be down. You strip the airplane down, and while you’re working on it, you’ve already got the airplane down, so you put Starlink on. That’s how we started.

We were only going to do 65% of our fleet because planes were retiring. Once we put it on the first aircraft, we started hearing all these anecdotes. I’m talking to people who say, “I’m switching to flying a regional flight because it’s got Starlink.” I was like, “Holy cow.”

I was booking a flight this week, and I was thinking it through. I had to book around the Brewers game. If I had known for certain that my flight was going to have Starlink, I would have booked it during the game. There’s such a huge gap between maybe there’s Starlink—

Congratulations, by the way.

Not yet. We’re not talking about it right now. Maybe there’s Starlink versus there’s definitely Starlink. It feels to me like you haven’t reaped any of the benefits yet, because certainty is going to make a huge difference.

I think you’re right. I think we’ve got some benefits, but getting to 50% matters. We run a tracker today that gives you a bunch more data. We’re going to put the probability that there’ll be Starlink on your flight in the app sometime soon, so at least you know the probability. It’ll be different by flight.

Today, if you’re flying on a MAX 8, it might be 25%. But if you’re booking for Christmas, it’s 36%, because we know how many we plan to have done. We’re also going to have a bunch of premier markets that we get to 100%. I’m not going to tell you the date yet, but our first hub that’s going to be 100% Starlink is Los Angeles. Sometime in the first half of next year, if you’re in LA—

Is that because that’s the most competitive hub?

It’s a competitive hub, but it’s also the kind of aircraft that fly there. The only aircraft that are still a challenge are the 787s. We have to get Boeing over the finish line on some of the certification work. We will get there, but if you’ve got a market like San Francisco that has a lot of 787s, it’s just going to take longer because Boeing is slower.

Was the CapEx or OpEx more painful in the economic model as you looked at it?

The numbers weren’t that big.

Oh, really? But then why is Delta’s strategy rational, or do you think it’s completely mistaken?

It was a mistake. At all airlines, even the ones that picked it after United had done it, they’re stepping into it gradually. That’s just the way we’ve always done it in airlines. Everything is slow. You do an aircraft modification; it takes 8 years. That’s the way we’ve done it. I think it’s just the way everyone has done it.

If you’re thinking this is an 8-year project, then, okay, I’m a year behind on starting, but that’s not that big of a deal. United will be at 12%. We’ll be a year behind. It’s not going to be enough to matter. In a traditional way of looking at it, it can feel rational.

I don’t think people—even we didn’t appreciate how big it was. I thought it was big, then we put the pedal to the metal, and SpaceX supported us.

Is this going to be the biggest differentiator of all time?

I think it is. I think it’s the biggest competitive advantage. And it’s temporary. Everybody eventually is going to have high-speed, low Earth orbit.

It’s going to be a must-have. But we’re going to have a few years of being the only airline that has it at scale. Our mission is to convince customers that United is the best airline and get them to switch their loyalty to United. They’ll get our credit card and switch their loyalty to United.

They’re not going to stay because of Starlink. They’re going to try us for Starlink, and they’re going to stay because all the other technology and everything else is better. The technology in particular is so much better than the technology at other airlines, and it’s accelerating because we’ve got the right tech stack. Our gap is getting wider and wider with our technology every day.

You have a two- to three-year window to woo customers.

Exactly. That’s exactly right.

What do you think of Elon’s strategy of requiring airlines to make it free?

We were going to make it free anyway. Free was going to be the plan. Although, in fairness, free isn’t the value proposition. Fast is the value proposition. The truth is, I’ve flown all 3 of my big competitors who have it free on the legacy systems, and it’s terrible. I’ve flown them each 2 or 3 times in the last year. It’s terrible because there’s not enough bandwidth. It’s physics: there’s not enough bandwidth to make it free.

I was sad when they started making it free, because I thought, “This is going to make my experience worse.”

It makes it unusable for almost everyone. Free was never the value proposition. Fast is the value proposition, and there’s only 1 option for fast. It’s Starlink. That’s the only option. You could call the other one fast and free, but it’s not. It’s like dial-up internet—slower dial-up internet.

You mentioned that in the long run, everyone will have Starlink. The technology stack is—

Or maybe Amazon, but they’ll have low Earth orbit.

How do you think about the long run, where one reason people prefer, say, Asian airlines over American airlines is that they feel the soft bits are better? Do you need to circle back around to that in the long run?

I want us to be the best at everything and acknowledge that Asian and Middle Eastern carriers are really good at service and product. It does help that they’re quasi-state entities and subsidized. We can’t do it and lose money. If you get ahead, you start to have exponential benefits. You can go faster and do more things.

I think being in the lead and never being complacent means we’re going to have to keep reinventing things and doing stuff to make it great for customers. I think we’ll have a big lead. When you have a big lead, you have the resources to invest. Everyone else is mired in hitting the Wall Street number for next quarter, and the only way to do that is to cut your investments. They get mired in short-termism, and they don’t invest. Our constraint on investing in technology is how much we can manage. It is not money.

You’ve talked about airlines being run by operations people, where taking cheese out of the pizza is the only move. What has given you more social permission with your investors and your board to do things like the bigger aircraft order during COVID and, “We’re going to do Starlink”? It feels like you’ve taken bigger swings. Is that just that you’ve seen the future better, or do you somehow have more permission to take big swings?

I think we’re better at seeing the future. I don’t know if we talked about it here, but I think reading as much as I do helps. We talked about the two— I think people who do that, who connect dots, can see the things in the tails better than others. They can spot the opportunity where other people don’t.

I have a great board who’s been supportive. I spend a ton of time communicating with the board and keeping them involved. We talk about what’s going on, and I have a lot of support from them for doing that. From the external perspective, Wall Street almost always hates the big things we do, and I don’t care.

What are some big things they’ve hated?

The aircraft investment. They don’t say, “Don’t invest in technology,” but they want your CASM-ex, your cost per available seat mile, to be the only thing that matters. We can’t control things like airport fees going up. Union contracts are what they are. The only way you can cut the budget is to not invest for the future. We’re going to invest for the future.

In the long run, it works out. I’ll hear other CEOs complain, “Oh, Wall Street is short-term.” What I say to them is, “Yes, they are. Stop complaining about it. That is what it is. But what you should do is invest for the long term and do the right thing. By the way, if it doesn’t work, you ought to lose your job, and you ought to be comfortable with that. You get paid a lot of money. Make the big bet. If it works, great. Shareholders will like it. But if it doesn’t work, you deserve to be fired. If you’re not willing to take that risk, then stop complaining about it.”

Yes. More gamblers as CEOs.

More gamblers.

Everyone in tech loves—or I think a lot of people in tech love—airlines. It’s super interesting, but the actual job: how many employees does United have?

120,000.

120,000, with a wide range of skills and abilities. Some are on the ramp; some are doing route planning. With all this experience, what’s the key to managing that and getting people excited? You’re dealing with unions and all these sorts of things.

I think being the CEO of almost any company, but certainly for me, is really 99% one thing: creating the right culture. I was in L.A. yesterday, and I told the whole team what I just told you guys. The first hub that’s going to get all Starlink, you’re going to get a lot of people coming across the terminal, where Delta is, across the roadway, to United. They’re going to try us, even though they’re loyal to another very good airline. Your mission is to make sure they know United is the best airline in Los Angeles. They’re all like, “Yeah, we’re going to do it.”

People want to win. It’s fun.

People want to win. It’s fun.

I want to come back to Wall Street. You talked about investor perception. Historically, airlines were the canonical example of a bad business. There’s the famous Buffett line that a farsighted capitalist would have shot down Orville at Kitty Hawk. Airlines had cumulatively lost money until 1992. I think the entire industry had lost money on an aggregate basis since Kitty Hawk.

That’s no longer true. It seems to have really changed. Now airlines are more robustly profitable. I think Berkshire owned at least some airline stocks for a while recently. Has the structure changed? Presumably, you think yes. What has changed such that airlines are no longer the poster child for—

Well, yes and no. It had gotten better, but you look at what’s happening in the last 12 months, and things have gone backward. This year, 6 of 10 U.S. airlines are going to lose money, and much of it is structural. I talked about American earlier. They’re probably going to lose about $1.5 billion in Chicago this year. The golden rule of airlines is you can’t fly places that lose money.

In any business, if something loses money and it’s structural, you have to stop losing money. It’s not unique to that airline. Basically, almost every airline in every country has a place where they lose a bunch of money. In lots of places, airlines have margins worse than negative 100%. People sometimes think that’s mathematically impossible, but it’s possible. Yet they still fly those routes.

Ego is still big. I think ego is the reason those things have happened in the past. Ego still exists. But the structure of the industry that’s different today is that there are basically 2 winning airlines in the U.S.: United and Delta. We’ve created brand loyalty. Customers fly us not just because of the schedule, which is the commodity part of the business, but because of all the other stuff we’ve talked about today.

Even now, with oil prices up $8 billion for us this year, our best year in history made $5 billion. We’re not going to make as much this year as last, but we’re solidly profitable. It’s just a completely different picture.

But hang on. You think we’re still in the Juan Trippe era of aviation, where airlines aren’t being run by bean counters and they’re making incoherent, irrational decisions based on ego?

It’s probably not quite the Juan Trippe era, but there’s still a lot of ego involved in people adding routes. I started as a route planner. I could look at something and say, “You’re going to lose. That’s going to be a negative 40% margin,” somewhere between negative 30% and negative 50%.

How are you guys thinking about routes? You’ve added a bunch. You just announced all these new cities last week that I’ve never seen before.

Yeah, 10 new international destinations. That’s very cool.

How do you make the decisions? When you launch Nuuk in Greenland, is it that you have a vibe that it could work? Is it actually very… Is it card counting or poker?

That one’s different. It’s hiring great people, because I would never have picked Nuuk or known Nuuk. We’ve got a guy named Patrick Quayle and a great team who are really creative. They look for things that are different and outside the norm, things that aren’t in the data. We talked about data earlier. These aren’t in the data because no one’s ever done them, so there’s no data to support them. Nuuk has been really, really good as an example.

Really?

Yeah, people love it. It’s a great place to go. Across the Atlantic, by next summer, we’ll have 53 destinations.

We had 23 destinations 10 years ago, when I got to United. We’ll have 53 next summer. We’ve only had 2 that didn’t work, but we’re disciplined about it. When they don’t work, we stop. That’s the great thing: our assets are fungible.

Bergen, Norway, didn’t work. I think Norway’s awesome.

Bergen is incredible.

I think it should have worked, but it didn’t. We tried it, and it lost a little bit of money. It wasn’t that much. It lost a little, and we just stopped. That’s the great thing. We can try stuff and stop.

The fellow, Patrick Quay—

Patrick Quayle.

Yeah, Patrick Quayle. How does he make the decision that Nuuk is a go?

He has all kinds—They’re staying really connected to what’s happening in the world. Another example: I forget the names of these cities, but we added a couple of cities in Spain and Portugal that I’d never even heard of. I don’t remember their names now. They’re part of pilgrimage trips. Catholic pilgrims fly to one, walk the pilgrimage to the other, a couple of hundred miles apart, and then fly out of the other city.

You have to add both of them at the same time.

Anyway, he went and somehow read about pilgrimages. He got some data on how many people do it. Then he found data showing, “Oh, I can see all these broken itineraries where somebody flew us into one of the cities and flew another airline out of the other city.” We added them, and they went gangbusters.

He took a trip to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan this year. We can’t fly there today because we can’t fly over Russia, but he’s there like—

This could work.

This could work down the road. He’s doing stuff like that, and his team is great. He’d maybe be more interesting for one of your podcasts in the future than me.

Yeah, I’m very interested. Greenland, by the way, is fascinating. I love it. It’s a country of 50,000 people, and they’re going gangbusters building airports.

It’s the only way to get to those places.

Yes, but sure, it’s the only way to get there. An international airport in Nuuk maybe makes sense. They just replaced it, and that’s the new route that you guys have. But they’re replacing the airport in Narsarsuaq. There’s already a perfectly good airport there, and they’re building a new airport in the south, a full jet-capable international airport. They love these capital projects for a country of 50,000 people.

Nothing else to spend their money on, I guess.

But it’s such a cool, no pun intended, place to go. It can drive the economy: 50,000 people having people come in.

Sure.

It can drive the economy.

I want to talk about the tech for a second.

Yeah.

How should we feel about the last few decades of actual airframe advances? Everyone likes to talk about how the 737 first flew in 1967 at Mach 0.78, and the 737 MAX today flies at around Mach 0.78. The latest version does burn 50% less fuel, so that’s a significant improvement. It is 30 to 40 times safer, so that’s a significant improvement. But at the same time, people feel like this is one of those examples they trot out of stasis. How do you feel about the rate of technological improvements in airframes?

It’s maddening that we haven’t done more. In fact, this book—where is it? The Impossible Factory. Clarence “Kelly” Johnson developed the SR-71 and the U-2 in a couple of years, from start to finish.

I think the fundamental problem is Boeing and Airbus have a global duopoly, and they’ve quietly—not officially—agreed that neither one of them will invest in new airframes. They’re pacing the frontier. If you don’t have an option, we need a third aircraft manufacturer, to be blunt.

Okay, so you think there’s basically a breakdown of competition?

Yeah. Neither one of them has investors who want them to invest, so they just won’t do it. I’ve been begging them both for 20-something years to build a 757 replacement. I’ve been begging them, and they just won’t do it.

I’m actually on a 757 to Chicago. I’m a little nervous about it. It’s a great plane. The takeoff’s amazing.

Yeah, it’s a cool airplane.

Speed is obviously one thing, and you guys are working with Boom. But speed is also hard, and it requires much more fuel. Other than speed, what improvements would you like to see?

Well, a couple. I think the next generation of airframes could be built on the current airframes. I think the biggest thing is probably going to be blended-wing bodies. Think of the B-2 bomber. It’s a much more efficient airframe for flying. We’re an investor in a company called JetZero, which is trying—

Is that an airport challenge, though, too—

It creates airport challenges. It’s bigger, so airport space is an issue. But that’s really a gate challenge. You’ve got to re-gate. I think that’s an example of something.

Engine technology can advance as well. Another cool thing, by the way: we’re starting Relax Row later this year or next year. In coach, you can put 3 seats together, a bed comes out, and you can lie down on them. We have little United airplane stuffies. I’ve already got some for my kids. My kids love them, but that’s another cool—

But is that an example of basically a lot of the economic outcomes you’re looking for? I pushed you on this with the premium question.

Yeah.

How can you take a large, fixed-capital product and basically deliver infinite numbers of strata of pricing?

Yes and no. I don’t think of it that way. I think we’re trying to build a brand. We’re trying to build a great brand. Something like Relax Row, I think, will be profitable. But it’s not even going to show up in our financials. It’s cool, and it’s good to do stuff that’s cool and good for families.

As I said earlier, I have 7 kids. I think of air travel through the lens of a parent traveling alone with a couple of young kids. How do we make it easy for them? If we can make it easy for them, we’re going to make it great for everyone.

Relax Row is perfectly consistent with making it easy. Starlink is great for them. It’s seat-back entertainment. I love walking through our airplanes with seat-back entertainment, which a lot of airlines went away from. You’ll see kids watching, and parents totally relaxed because their kids are watching Bluey.

I heard you could now watch Cheeky Pint on there.

You can now watch Cheeky Pint on the in-flight entertainment.

That’s cool.

It’s pretty cool. People are probably watching this.

Maybe I’ll watch this.

Exactly. You can just put it on there. When you’re saying things like Relax Row, social media has almost changed airline marketing. There could be things that maybe aren’t the biggest from a ticket-booking perspective, but if they get people broadly excited about United, that’s valuable.

I look at all the Starlink stuff that’s happening. We’re trying to build a brand.

Sure. You’re feeding it. That’s your flywheel.

I feel bad for Ed, but I love it for us. Actually, we had a big push that was coming.

I was going to ask about it. How did you decide to run those ads? Because you only have 50%—are you ready to do this?

We were waiting to cross the 50% threshold next Friday before really pushing. We were going to do it anyway, but that was a moment. Our team is great. Maggie Schmerin, our VP, runs that. It’s awesome, and she did it.

One piece of advice she gives companies is this: she did it without asking me. She knew not to ask me. No approvals. She’s awesome. I trust her. That creates speed.

Most companies, especially big traditional companies, have 16 layers of approvals. You can’t do stuff fast, creative, fun, or interesting because it just gets watered down. She just went out and did it, knowing she had support from everyone at the company. She did it.

I was at a CVS board meeting because I’m on the board of CVS Health, and people started asking me, “This is cool.” I hadn’t even read about it. I was like, “Oh, what did we do? That’s cool.”

As we think about the airline business in the United States, before 1978 everything was very heavily regulated. United flew on routes approved by the government, with fares set by the government. I think people don’t realize, when they look at those old-timey ’60s photos of someone coming along with a lobster cart, why everything looks so brilliant. At that time, airlines couldn’t compete on price and therefore competed on perks. We’re much better off these days, when you actually have a real market and real price competition.

One of the places where we have less of a free market in air travel is the slot system. There are a very limited number of slots at airports. I don’t fully understand how slots are granted, but do we have a breakdown of competition in certain airports because of this wacky slot system?

Yeah, but I think it’s at the margins. What’s bad for customers is scheduling more flights than an airport can handle. That’s what’s really bad for customers.

Well, didn’t that happen in Chicago, though?

It did.

Maybe it was going to happen. It happened in Newark historically. We finally got it, effectively slot control at the airport. It’s now the most reliable.

Oh, you wanted slot control because it’s bad for customers?

It’s horrible for customers. I begged the FAA, and we finally did it.

But that’s the contrast, right? In Chicago, you’re making this move, this wacky law. Every year, they re—sort of—

What’s the wacky law?

Every year, they take a number of flights from the previous year and reallocate the gates. But it’s a weird thing. It takes a while to move the gates. It’s this weird time delay that’s introduced into it.

It created a bad outcome. It’s part of how American lost a billion and a half, because American wasn’t paying attention to what happened in Chicago and lost 6 gates to us.

They weren’t paying attention? It’s like forgetting to renew the internet domain.

By the time they were doing all those, United had added on so many flights.

We hadn’t done anything. We went back to our normal pre-COVID schedule.

Yes.

American was focused on the Sun Belt, and they talked about it publicly: Phoenix, Dallas, Miami. More demand, leisure demand. That’s what they were focused on. They just didn’t add back their schedules, and we didn’t do anything special. Because they did that, they lost gates to us.

You have to have slots because that’s the only way to manage a limited resource. They’re mostly grandfathered, which is probably fair. If you’re British Airways and you’ve invested billions of dollars in London to build facilities and stuff, then they say, “Oh, we’re going to take them away and give them to someone else.”

But there’s a balance here. You both want people to earn a return, and you want Schumpeterian destruction, where British Airways should only be allowed to recoup so much investment, right?

Yeah. I think the better answer is to change air traffic control and create more slots. You can create more slots with better air traffic control, and then you can allocate those in whatever way you see fit. But the other thing that’s happened at all these big airports with slot controls is that the government entities that run them have made the costs so prohibitive that no low-cost carriers can afford to fly there.

The New York airports now cost $52 per passenger to fly out of. Spirit Airlines, before they liquidated, had an average fare of $58. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’re paying $52 out of $58 before you buy your fuel, your airplanes, or pay your employees and maintenance, that just mathematically doesn’t work. The big airports in the country are up something like 70% in expenses from pre-COVID to today. They’ve just priced low-cost carriers out of the market.

Well, did you price low-cost carriers out of the market?

We didn’t price them out.

You had the basic economy, and you had this much more fine-grained cutting up of the seats.

The low-cost carrier business model was predicated on having a price advantage, being able to charge a lower price. We created basic economy where we could profit, and we upgauged airplanes so we could profitably be competitive on price most of the time. If we’re competitive on price, there’s no reason. My joke was, “People may make the mistake of flying Spirit once, but they’re not going to do it twice.”

Why did Spirit go bust?

Because they weren’t charging as much as their costs. They were not able to charge enough—

That’s what I’m trying to ask—

It’s pretty simple. They weren’t able to charge enough. Look, what’s happening—

It was because of cost inflation, basically.

Cost inflation, but there are a whole bunch of things. Fundamentally, what I think has happened to the low-cost carriers is that there’s really one successful airline in the world that’s still a low-cost carrier. It’s Ryanair.

I was going to ask.

The fundamental premise of a low-cost carrier is to fly to low-cost airports. Southwest, when they started flying here, they flew to Oakland, not San Francisco. San Francisco is too expensive. In LA, they didn’t fly to LAX. They flew to Burbank and Ontario. LAX is too expensive. Ryanair still does it. Ryanair doesn’t fly to Heathrow. They don’t fly to Charles de Gaulle. They fly to secondary airports, because they’re low-cost.

All these companies’ eyes get too big for their—

In the US, every single one of them abandoned that.

Is it an ego?

Then they went to fly into… I don’t know why.

They run out of customers, right?

Yeah, and they went into Chicago and Newark and San Francisco. Back to the New York... You can’t charge 58 bucks when you’re paying the airport authority 52. You just can’t.

Is it a chasing growth story? I’m always very impressed by In-N-Out as a business because they don’t chase growth. They famously do everything within one day’s drive of the refrigeration centers... Distribution centers. And so they’re only in the California West Coast type area. They don’t feel the desire to go crazy on the menu: “We have the salad this, and we have whatever that.” I see they keep the menu very narrow. I feel like maybe if they’re a public company, they were trying to chase growth, and we’re going to expand this way. And they just do the same thing exceptionally well with a cost advantage.

Is the problem that as public companies, maybe, or as just short-term oriented companies, they had this good thing flying to Oakland and flying to the secondary airports, and for whatever reason, they just got distracted from it?

Yeah, I would actually say a little different than just chasing growth. I would say, know who you are, know what your strengths are, and stick to your knitting.

Companies are not good at trying to be something they’re not. In the past, this predated me, but all the big airlines, American, Delta, Northwest, Continental, tried to go compete with Southwest by creating airlines within an airline that were going to try to out-Southwest Southwest. In Europe, they still do it. In Asia, they still do it. They try to out-low-cost carry low-cost carry. And they’re terrible at it! Every single one of them has been. Nobody does it well.

By the way, Southwest has now tried to be like us. They’re not going to be very good at that either. You got to stick to the things that you’re good at. We aren’t going to ever go try to compete with Allegiant Air and be Allegiant Air because we’d be terrible. They’re better at Allegiant.

If they try to compete with us—

The low-cost model works, but you have to understand.

You got to stick to it. You got to accept that there’s limitations. “I’m not going to be as big as United Airlines. I’m not going to fly to Chicago O’Hare.” I have a great… Allegiant is an example. Allegiant Air, you know, it mostly flies to Vegas. They fly from small cities. They’ve done a great... They’re one of the four airlines that is going to be profitable this year.

What else have you learned from Ryanair?

The guy’s entertaining. Michael O’Leary is entertaining.

We’d like to get him in the pub here.

You had him here?

No, I would like to.

You’ll get a few more swear words out of him than you get out of me.

He knows his business exceptionally well. He’s a very impressive CEO. They’re also like In-N-Out. They’ve avoided distraction.

He’s disciplined.

They always get asked about transatlantic.

Discipline is probably a better way.

It doesn’t work because you don’t get the low-cost advantage when you can’t get the number of turns high enough. They get asked about Wi-Fi on the planes, and it’s like, “Guys, the flights are short. Just look at your phone for an hour or something. You don’t need it on an hour-long flight.”

He’s disciplined. That’s a better way of saying it. Getting outside, you have to be disciplined to be successful. Companies get stars in their eyes, and they’re not disciplined.

What’s the version of discipline for you? It’s easy for a huge global airline like United: You fly big aircraft, small aircraft, internationally, domestically. It would be easy to want to do everything, like, “We’re cost-competitive, but we have a great wine list.” What is your version of staying disciplined?

In the airline business, discipline is really about where you fly. The foundation of our product starts with the route network—

You fly routes that make money—

And fly places that make money. Every time I go—

Does that mean you’re less point-to-point in domestic markets?

We don’t fly point-to-point. I hear it all the time. In L.A. yesterday, and when I do stuff with employees in San Francisco tomorrow, they’re always asking to fly new routes and point-to-point routes. It won’t work for us.

We’re an airline that flies to our hubs.

We fly to our hubs. That’s our strength, for a whole bunch of reasons. We’re not going to try to fly point-to-point routes.

If you’re not first, you’re last.

If you’re not first, you’re last. That’s true in the airline business. It’s by market; it’s not overall. People in Dallas ask me, “Why do you not fly here?” Because we’d lose. American has too much network depth. When they fly from Dallas to Los Angeles, 75% of the people on the airplane are connecting from other destinations.

If we’re just flying Dallas–LA, we can’t compete because we don’t have any connections. We’re competing for 25% of the market. It doesn’t work.

Does that mean the little decisions you make are, “Okay, should we fly from Newark to Greenland?” That’s a little decision. The big decision is, “Are we going to launch a beachhead and take a new hub?” How frequently do you make those decisions?

Rarely.

Was the last big hub Denver, when you grew it hugely?

This was an existing hub that we chose to grow. In my 30-year career, I’ve closed 3 hubs and never opened a new one. It’s a hard decision to make. It’s very rare for that to work. There are lots of examples in the airline industry of it not working, and almost none of it working in the post-deregulation era.

Do you think it’s basically impossible to launch a new hub these days? Building a new airport—it just hasn’t happened in the last 50 years.

Yes is the short answer. Take the Southeast. It’s the one part of the country where we’re number 3 because Delta has a hub in Atlanta and American has a hub in Charlotte. I’d like us to be bigger in the Southeast, and it doesn’t matter to customers, but there’s simply no airport that’s big enough for us to be competitive. We would need to have 600 flights a day to be competitive with American and Delta. The biggest city that might work, that’s big enough, is maybe Raleigh-Durham. But the airport isn’t big enough. There aren’t enough gates or runways. You couldn’t have 600 flights a day. We don’t try to do something just because it’s a cool vision. We’re disciplined.

But this would be a big enough deal for a region that you could work with Raleigh-Durham to expand the airport?

Expanding airports in this country is a decade-long process.

Yeah, more. That’s optimistic, probably. Okay, so you think it’s just—

It’s possible someday we’ll at least experiment with going into a big city that’s not really a hub for anyone. Delta has done some of that. It’s been, I think, break-even-ish, but they haven’t lost money.

You did, though. This wasn’t a hub at all, but way back in the day, you used to have a hub in Narita. You’ve added a few connecting flights. There’s one from Hong Kong to Thailand and Vietnam—

Ulaanbaatar. It’s on the margins, but there are places like Tokyo where we have connectivity with our partner. We realized that a lot of the people flying us into Tokyo were ultimately trying to get to Ulaanbaatar, and it was really hard. ANA didn’t fly there.

That is a mess. Wait, I don’t believe that—

What’s going on here—

That number is way too high.

It was in the summer, but it was a high percentage of people.

For vacation?

Yeah.

Am I missing something? I haven’t been to Ulaanbaatar. Am I missing anything?

I haven’t been there either. My mom went. My mom travels a lot. She uses my flight benefits and travels a lot. She’s just awesome. We’ve seen that data, and we added the flight. Now a lot of the people who fly with us into Tokyo connect on to Ulaanbaatar. It was a particular flight: at one time of day, it was 12% of the people. But we also have all the ANA connections. They weren’t flying.

Kaohsiung is the same thing.

Why Sapporo? It’s going to be fun.

Sapporo is booking really well. It’s going to be—

Is that for skiing?

Skiing.

Yeah.

But Japan has become the hottest destination—

For the tech people here in San Francisco.

People just love it. Even in Dallas, people love Japan. I have all kinds of friends who say, “We went to Japan for spring break,” and they love the food. The people are great. They just love it.

What I’m taking away from this is that route selection makes or breaks airlines.

Yes.

It broke Spirit and the low-cost carriers. It broke American in this fracas you guys had.

Well, they haven’t accepted that it broke them, but it did.

Then, similarly, success means a disciplined route expansion strategy that understands your strengths.

Look, that’s pretty insightful. I tell new CEOs, many of whom call to talk to me—I don’t think any of them have taken my advice yet—but I tell them, “The one thing I’ll tell you: start with the route network as the foundation. If that’s broken, it doesn’t matter how well you do everything else. If you have bad routes that lose money, you cannot make the airline work. It is impossible.” If you look through the route P&L, which you should do, you’re going to see a bunch of negative flying. When you ask people about it, they’re going to say it’s strategic.

They’re going to have convincing excuses.

They’re going to call it strategic. If you hear the words “strategic flying,” you don’t need to know what hub it is or what route it is; you should cancel it. You have to stop flying anything that loses money by default but is supposedly strategic. You have to cancel it, and they don’t do it.

What are the lies people tell themselves to convince themselves to keep running a route? What does it mean to be strategic?

Corporate customers, something like that.

Yeah, or credit cards. If we’re not big in this city, then we just won’t get the credit card—

Is that the biggest tail risk if credit cards ever go away?

No, it’s not nearly as big as people think.

The perception is big because people look at the amount of revenue we get and say, “Oh, almost all your net profit is coming from credit cards.” Well, yeah, but there’s a cost. We carry over 50,000 people a day. Today, 50,000 people will fly free on United Airlines by using their credit card miles. Nobody counts the cost of carrying 50,000 people.

Oh, you’re saying they just can’t do an accurate contribution profit calculation?

Yes. All we disclose is the revenue. Everyone’s like, “Oh, look at the revenue.” Fifty thousand people a day are flying for free. There’s a cost to carrying 50,000 people.

Okay, so the whole Twitter meme that airlines are a credit card business with airplanes attached is just them holding the financial statement upside down.

They’re looking at the revenue side and ignoring the cost side. It’s important. It’s good, but—

But it’s blown way out of proportion.

But it’s blown way out of proportion.

How do you think about changes in the frequent flyer program? You just went to, I think, 32,000 points, or whatever you call it. I appreciate getting rid of the segment one because I never qualified on that one, so I appreciate the simplification. But is that a—

You generally just seem to want to keep the riffraff out, like with the Wi-Fi, with the—

It’s a real challenge here.

They want the cutoff to be right below Ben.

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

I applaud these changes. I looked back on my past few years. I’ve always well exceeded 32,000, so it’s no problem for me. I want emptier lounges, so it’s all good. What’s the calculation there? Delta obviously has gotten a lot of grief from my frequent flyers over the changes they made. Yours seemed to go fairly well. What do you think that was?

I don’t think about it through the lens of the frequent flyer program. I think about how we grow brand loyalty. The frequent flyer program is one of those things. If we’re doing something that’s going to detract from brand loyalty, there’s got to be a good reason to do it. Clubs are another example. How many people are Global Services members? People love being Global Services, but we limit it. It’s exclusive.

There was one year I thought I was going to make it. January passed and it never came. It was very sad.

Clubs are another example. During COVID, I’m pretty sure we were the only airline that did this: we doubled down on club investment. We’ve more than doubled our square footage of club space since pre-COVID, and it’s going to grow by another 50%. It was the one time in history when we could do this. If you close a club, it’s complicated. Closing a club makes customers mad in the short term. Sometimes you have to do it to expand. But COVID was the one time in history when we had to spend money but had no customers. We could get away with doing it, and we could do it faster. Expanding club space is what we’ve been focused on. We’re going to do more of that. Those are the kinds of things we’re more focused on. Any changes to the frequent flyer program are about trying to build loyalty.

That is just, “We could deliver a better experience if there were fewer people.”

Well, sometimes it’s that. I guess there’s only a certain number. We’re putting more first-class seats on, but at any given time, we only have so many first-class seats on airplanes. We’re calibrating the program to make it valuable for loyal customers.

You run the Star Alliance board?

Not anymore.

Oh, you used to. What’s that like? It’s an interesting construct, right? The airline business is one of these businesses where the airlines are kind of competitors, but you do run some overlapping routes. It’s better to work together, but then you have to pick who you work together with.

How much are you picking based on the vibe of the other CEO versus whether it’s strategic? How much does that change?

We’re all locked into alliances now. It’s hard to switch. The real value for customers is being able to connect on to places that we don’t fly to. When we fly, we fly into Frankfurt and Munich, and I think we have 4 times as many flights into Frankfurt and Munich as American and Delta combined. But it’s because we have a partnership with Lufthansa.

I think 60% of the people on our Frankfurt and Munich flights are connecting beyond Munich. They’re going to Kazakhstan and all kinds of places that we don’t fly to. That’s the value for customers. The downside is the experience doesn’t feel the same as on United. That’s what we’ve been working to do. We’ve made a lot of progress.

A few years ago, I finally asked and asked and asked other airlines about this, and I finally said, “If you don’t have seat assignments available for our customers, we’re going to turn off our partnership with you.” That got everyone to do it. We’d been begging them to do it for years, but it just wasn’t a priority for them. Other stuff wasn’t their priority. We finally had to say, “We’re going to cut you off unless you do it.”

My focus on our partnerships has been: If a United customer is flying on any of our partners, how do we make it feel to them like it’s still United Airlines? I think the other airlines ought to be doing this—

Is that the nature of the partnership? You provide the most customers, and so that ultimately gives you the control—

Yeah, we’re by far the biggest and have access to the big hubs. Lufthansa is second. Across the Pacific, ANA is big. There are several big partners. But some of the others are like—one of my favorite airlines is Croatia. I love the people. They’re small, with turboprop airplanes.

I love Croatia. It’s a great country. Super fun. People are awesome. I like the CEO. I like the culture. I like the people. It doesn’t drive a ton of economic value, but when we try to do new stuff, if we’re going to do new technology stuff, they’re one of the smallest. They raise their hand every time, so I appreciate that.

Your career is very much defined by consolidation and doing stuff together. You’ve been talking about, “Oh, we should just buy American Airlines,” or whatever it might be. Is there any limit to your belief in the power of consolidation and doing a better consumer experience?

I was going to start with, thank you for adding that. My belief is that delivering a better consumer experience works. We’re not in a commodity business. Maybe that’s not true in steel, because it’s a commodity. But in non-commodity businesses, doing things that are good for your customers is the winning formula.

The consolidation dynamic you’re referencing—I actually hadn’t thought about this—is that ultimately, eliminating duplicative flights in a capacity-constrained airport, which is all the major ones, means that you can have more selection as a—

That’s the Chicago example.

But it’s not just that.

It’s not just that. The American rationale is, I would like to create an airline that Americans, broadly, are proud of, that they think of as the flag carrier of the United States. If you go to Dubai, people are proud of Emirates. They may complain about stuff, but they’re proud of Emirates. They recognize that Dubai, the wealthy city-state, exists because of Emirates. They’re hand in hand.

Singapore, same thing. Singapore is not Singapore without Singapore Airlines. I would like to create the same thing. We also have a massive trade deficit with international airlines. Two-thirds of the long-haul seats into the US are from our competitors, even though only 40% of the customers are coming from overseas, because they’re all state-subsidized.

There are a bunch of reasons for it. I’m not complaining about those. But I would like to create an airline that can compete head-to-head with those airlines. By the way, that doesn’t create as many good jobs in the US. There are a whole bunch of reasons. I would create a great airline in the US that can really compete head-to-head with state-subsidized entities around the globe—not just in totality, but on every factor.

Anything we haven’t covered?

He does have 7 kids. He goes to soccer games, reads a lot of books, and apparently runs a global airline. How do you pull that off?

I’m very efficient with time management.

Was this a post-kid thing?

No, I’ve always been.

Oh, you’ve always been? Okay—

I have a bunch of weird quirks, if you want to ask, but my wife can tell you they’re about time efficiency.

Please tell us the weird quirks. You can’t set that up and then not share it.

The one that people find the most amusing, I think, is 90% of the time you use a fork, I use a spoon. By the way, I use a serving spoon.

Completely agree. Spoons are the most underrated—

Because it’s so much more efficient. Eating a salad—

The lettuce will fall off, no?

No, I cut it up. Then you can mix it all up, too.

It’s tastier because you get all the little bits and pieces on the spoon. I’m completely with you.

I watch my wife; she’s mad at me. She stabs a tomato and eats a tomato. Then she stabs a piece of lettuce and eats a piece of lettuce. Mine’s all mixed up. It does taste good, and it’s faster. A salad has little nuts and cheese crumbles and stuff. You eat it with a fork, and all that good stuff falls off and is left on the plate.

I presume your wife loves you salad-splaining her like this and telling her how to do it.

No, she gets super annoyed with me. But the bigger things are, I only have 2–3 hours of meetings a day. I limit myself to 2–3 hours, and I don’t waste time. In particular, I’m not on social media. I do write my own stuff for LinkedIn and Instagram, but I don’t even know how to log on.

I watch other people on TikTok or YouTube and think, “Oh, my God, what are you doing? It’s such a time waste.” I don’t watch TV, really. I don’t waste time.

Not watching TV is a huge one.

If you don’t waste time, you’ve got time for a whole bunch of other stuff.

You have the sleep one, right?

I sleep 8 and a half hours a night. Last night, I slept over 9.

I do find the short-sleeping contest in American business a very funny one, because the deleterious cognitive effects are very well proven.

Yeah, and you can watch people in meetings who don’t get enough sleep. They’re not technically asleep, but their brains are turned off. You can just see they’re zoned out. I’ve always slept a lot. One of the other things I used to do is count cards. When I’d go to Vegas to count cards, I would only sleep like 3 hours a night because I just wanted to maximize my time at the table. I realized that when I got tired—

You lost count?

Well, I was having to go back and check. Normally, I could just glance at a table. I’d done it so much, I’d see it. I was having to realize I was probably making mistakes.

I’m maximizing time and losing money.

When I got tired, I stopped doing that. I started just going to bed and getting back to my 8.5 hours of sleep.

Are you still allowed back to Vegas, or are you blocked?

I’m allowed to go, but I’m not allowed to play blackjack. I went back for the Super Bowl when it was in Vegas, and I’d gotten a credit line set up to play poker. I sat down at the poker tables and had to give them my ID, so they came back. A manager came over. It was like 15 years ago that I got barred at the Bellagio. The manager comes over, and he’s like, “Mr. Kirby, you’re welcome to play any game in the casino, but just so you know, still no blackjack.” I wasn’t planning to, but okay.

It’s like when you get a little bit older, and you buy some booze, and they check your ID. “Oh, they check your ID?” That’s like the platinum version of it.

That’s true. That’s true.

With card counting these days in Vegas—

It’s impossible today.

Are they blocking it with the multiple decks and shuffling frequently?

Well, they also changed the rules. The rules are like 6:5 blackjack. The math is impossible—

They’ve just subtly changed the odds.

They’ve changed the odds.

I don’t think it’s very subtle.

Apparently, people still do it.

All righty.

All right. This has been fun.

This was awesome.

I enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Thanks, John. Ben, good to see you again.

Thank you.