This represents an important milestone in further aligning the cultures of our two airlines. I know change can be difficult and I want to thank our integration office and the broader team for their leadership and commitment through this transition. Let me turn for a moment to labor. We've reached some meaningful milestones. We are actively implementing the Flight Attendant Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement, or JCBA, that was ratified earlier this year. and I'm pleased to say several important provisions are now live for our flight attendants, including the introduction of boarding pay earlier this month. These are real, tangible improvements for our flight attendants who care for our passengers every day. With respect to our pilots, we continue to actively negotiate with the IBT and ELPA teams and I want to thank both unions for their continued engagement and we will provide further updates as meaningful progress is achieved. In May, Republic's mechanic associates elected IBT as their bargaining representative. We are still early in the stages here and look forward to engaging constructively with our mechanics and their representatives as that process moves forward. Now, let me turn the call over to Joe to review the financial highlights for the quarter, and then I'll come back to provide an update on guidance. Joe?

Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. As Matt noted, strong partner demand and improved operating performance drove block hour production up 7% sequentially and revenues up 8% to approximately $571 million for the quarter. Second quarter gap net income was $31.2 million or $0.68 per diluted share. Pre-tax income was $43.4 million. Excluding executive separation and merger-related items and the mark-to-market on our EVE investment and adjustments to our equity investment in Cape Bear, both of which are included in the non-operating income expense line, adjusted net income was $41.3 million, or $0.89 per diluted share. Adjusted pre-tax income was $57.4 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $109.6 million for the quarter. The adjustments primarily consist of costs associated with the CEO transition, other severance related to the MESA integration, and professional fees tied to the ongoing integration work and certain duplicative overheads at MESA. These items are expected to subside as the integration milestones are achieved and when we reached the end of the revision cycle process in early 2028. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $278 million in unrestricted cash, up slightly from $273 million at the end of March. Capital expenditures during the quarter were approximately $21 million and we repaid $43 million of debt. During the quarter, we received refunds of tariffs paid of approximately $20 million and the offset went to reduce the basis in the aircraft and does not have a material impact on our financial results or guidance. Total debt and lease liability stood at $1.2 billion at quarter end. We continue to make solid progress on our deleveraging initiatives. Our fleet ended the quarter at 314 aircraft, unchanged from March. and just a reminder, 275 aircraft are operating under capacity purchase agreements, 31 aircraft are on lease to a partner and eight aircraft remain unallocated. We remain focused on finding solutions to meet our partners' growth needs and continue to work on redeployment opportunities of the unallocated aircraft. Lastly, I noted on our last call, we have 26 delivery positions with Embraer, and our next scheduled delivery position is in April of 2028. We retain significant fleet flexibility to meet our partners' needs and fund future growth of our business. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Matt to provide us an update on 2026 guidance.

Matt? Thank you, Joe. Turning to guidance, the improved operating environment we experienced in Q2 has not translated to the start of Q3. July weather across the East Coast and in the Mid-Atlantic, the heart of our Northeast operations, has been severe. Through July 28th, our completion factor for the month stood at 91%. To put that in perspective, That is below where we ended in either January or February, the months hit by major winter storms. But here's what I want you and our team to hear clearly. Our people have met the moment. Through some of the most demanding conditions we've seen, our associates delivered post irregular operations recovery efforts that reflect the culture of excellence that we've built. maintaining a 99.99% controllable completion factor in this environment. This gives me real confidence in what our team is capable of delivering for the back half of the year. On our Q1 call, I said absent the macro uncertainty, guidance would have been increased at that time. Despite the recent headwinds we just discussed, with an additional quarter completed, we are now able to increase our guidance for the year. We now expect the following. 2026 Black Hour production of approximately 880,000 hours, up roughly 2% from our previous guidance of at least 865,000 hours. Revenues expected to be greater than $2.1 billion, up from the greater than $2 billion target, and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $395 million to $405 million, up from the greater than $380 million target we previously provided. We have no changes to our previously issued guidance for capital expenditures or debt reduction. To recap, despite a more volatile market and the extraordinary weather challenges of the third quarter so far, we continue to see solid demand for our product and we are raising our full year outlook. We remain focused on cost discipline and executing on our strategic initiative, the successful integration of MESA and Republic. We are ahead of schedule on each of our integration work streams. We've consolidated back office responsibilities. We received FAA approval on our first revision cycle. And next month, we take the important step of relocating MESA's network and operations center to our Carmel campus in Indiana. Each of these steps brings us closer to greater efficiencies, stronger financial performance, and enhanced long-term shareholder value. We said 2026 would be a transformational year for Republic. It is proving to be exactly that. None of this progress would be possible without the dedication of our associates and the continued support of our partners and shareholders. As we move through the second half of the year, we remain focused on executing our integration priorities and continuing to deliver safe and reliable air service. And with that, Kenneth, we are ready to open the line for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We'd like to ask a question. Please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. And if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Savi Sith with Raymond James. Savi, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just on the guidance, Matt, you mentioned that, you know, last call you said that just given uncertainty, you weren't taking it up. And I was just curious, is this kind of confidence to take your guidance up just based on what you've completed already? Or are you getting... kind of greater confidence from your partners as they, you know, schedule kind of their block hours.

Hey, sorry, this is Matt. Thanks for the question. Thanks for joining the call. It's a bit of both. You know, we, as we talked in the first quarter, we had seen a demand signal that was greater than where we entered the year and what our plan of forecast was. And we continue to see that demand signal as we go through Q3 and Q4. Q3, we do have some noise and a lot of it is this weather disruption. As I said, we're at 91% through earlier this week. Our worst months during winter storms was just over 92%. So it kind of gives you an idea of the magnitude of that impact. But despite that noise, the organic demand signal remains strong. Demand for the product is strong. and we feel confident that we can take that number up through the past half a year here.

That's helpful. And then just on the MESA alignment side, I know a lot you were working on kind of aligning the maintenance on the aircraft. I was wondering where you were in kind of aligning that and getting kind of that fleet closer to kind of the legacy Republic fleet.

Yeah, so great, great question. And, you know, let me break it up as kind of answering it in two parts. First, we have our internal metrics of are we meeting our turn time reductions that we had planned for and the improvement that we thought we could bring to the MESA maintenance program. And we are, we're actually seeing all of those improvements on an aircraft by aircraft turn time. We still need to get through the entire fleet though, right? So it just, it changes the amount of duration that it takes for us to get through the entire fleet. It accelerates that. So you still don't start to see that real improvement or that impact to the back half of 2027. It just means though that, you know, the ability for us to actually meet those improved turn times ensures that that work gets done by the end of 2027 as opposed to going through 2028 if we were on the previous turn times at Mesa.

That makes sense. All right, great. Congratulations. Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Lindenberg with Deutsche Bank. Michael, your line is open. Oh, hey.

Oh, yeah. Hey. Hey, good morning, everyone. It's always nice to hear an airline characterize a year as a transformational year and still post double digit operating in pre-tax margins. And so my question is just, you know, as you in the release, you talk about, you know, the integration taking 18 to 24 months and then you get to a point where you expect to realize true operational synergies. How how can we express that in margin improvement? You know, we're at 10% on a pre-tax, 12% operating. Are we talking a couple hundred basis points of margin improvement once the full integration is complete? How should we think about that?

So, Michael, I don't know if we're ready to unpack what it looks like at the end of the road here yet. We're going to be able to unpack 2027 for you as we get toward our end of year forecast here, and we'll give you a bit of a peek into that. We really don't start to appreciate the full effects of this until we get through that back half of 2027 and fully into 2028, right? As we get into 2028, you'll start to see a lot of the noise, the redundancy, and the fleet improvements, right? That increase in utilization that will unlock at Mesa and in the fleet there begin to contribute both to the top line and to the bottom line. But I think the 2027 forecast that we're working through now will help unpack a bit of that and start to shape up what 2028 can look like as well.

When you talk about the fleet utilization, maybe to put some numbers around that, where are you today on a daily utilization and where do you think that could go?

So let me unpack where I really think the improvement on the MESA side is. In the fleet utilization concept there, we believe we could actually add about 10% to 15% when we get to full health on the maintenance program at MESA. If we look at the difference between the maintenance program at MESA and the maintenance program at Republic, how we've historically operated those fleets, We think there's a greater than 10% improvement in the overall MESA fleet once we get to the end of that 2027-2028 timeframe. The daily utilization for aircraft will fluctuate a little bit up and down from where we're at today seasonally, but it's really getting more of those aircraft put to work.

Mike, this is Joe speaking, and Matt's exactly right. It's really a increase in scheduled lines available to fly as the maintenance aircraft come back online. And so you get that what I'll call normal pickup to what we're seeing today on that fleet. And on a scheduled available aircraft line of flying, we're somewhere in that above 9.5, probably closer to 9.8. and, you know, our partners want to continue to try to squeeze as much utilization as they can out of the fleet. So we're ready to respond and we're positioning the fleet to be in a position to capture that utilization when available.

Thanks, Joe. My second actually is to you, Joe. Can you just remind us, this is a quick one, just your percentages of what you own of EVE and Cape Air?

Yeah, so we're about a 40% owner in the Cape Air Equity. And on the EVE investment, that's really a mark-to-market on the warrants that we hold related to EVE that flows through the non-operating line. Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Matt Koscal, President and Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks.

Thank you, Kenneth, and thank you all for joining us this morning. We've accomplished a great deal in the first half of the year, and that would not have been possible without the dedication of our over 8,500 aviation professionals and the trust and support of our long-term partners. Have a great rest of your day and I look forward to providing a further update next quarter.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.