Back on the Bus to Catch up with The Landline Company

Speaker 1:
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Tom Fitzgerald:
Hi, welcome back to the Wheels Up podcast on the TD Cowen Insights series. My name's Tom Fitzgerald and I'm airlines analyst here at TD Cowen, a division of TD Securities. We're joined today by David Sunde, the founder of The Landline Company, a multimodal startup partnering with passenger airlines across the US and Canada to provide ground transportation. David, how are you? Thanks so much for being with us today.
David Sunde:
Hey, Tom, I'm great. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Tom Fitzgerald:
To kick us off, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how you got started in transportation, and then, what led to the spark for The Landline Company.
David Sunde:
Yeah, for sure. Tom, maybe like a lot of folks that you talked to, I was born with some obsession with airlines naturally. Don't remember a time I wasn't trying to go to the local Continental Airlines ticket office in Houston where I grew up to find the old published flight schedules in those little booklets or collecting 1:200 scale SnapFit models or obsessing over the Jane's Anthology of Aircraft. That was like my childhood reading. Something early on, I really can't explain it. Have always loved aviation and adventure and travel and maps and all the stuff that goes along with being an AV geek, I suppose.
When I was in college, I studied industrial engineering, really, I guess, randomly. Had no idea how applicable that would be to the airline business, and the dots all kind of connected for me at a summer internship at American Airlines in Operations Research when I was 20. Had just an incredible summer, getting the chance to learn everything about the airline business and really kind of cemented my love, not only for I guess all things aviation, but just the business itself. I thought it was so fascinating. I'll never claim to be a world-class operations research professional or industrial engineer, but I did bring a lot of enthusiasm that summer for learning and bringing the coffee to the people who were really doing the work. Learned a ton, loved it.
Found network planning, which is maybe more suited for my passion and my lack of a Ph.D in mathematics. Did that at Alaska after spending some time at Seabury in consulting, and then ultimately, went to a startup called Surf Air. I've always have had a love or passion for someday being an entrepreneur. When I was a kid, I used to write business plans for a company called David Air Products. It's really creatively named.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Oh, there we go, yeah.
David Sunde:
Exactly. At Surf, again, I got to learn a ton and had an opportunity to see how hard it is to start your own business in transportation, and airlines specifically, but was not deterred, only more excited and motivated to do my own thing. I had, I guess, a focused but winding road of getting to meet incredible people, a lot of really important mentors along the way who taught me a ton. I think a really good balance of learning how big airlines work and then learning about the chaos of starting a business. That basically led me to decide to do something crazy in 2017-ish, when I was 27, and here we are.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Do you want to maybe even ... just kind of stepping back and just thinking about the solution and the niche that The Landline Company has, maybe just talking about the number of small markets that have lost service as 50-seat and smaller regional jets have become less economical to serve, just given where cost pressures have gone post-Covid. I think the first time we talked, you talked about Oxnard, California losing air service. Just maybe helping the audience kind of understand what the opportunity is and how the industry has evolved over the last 20, 25 years.
David Sunde:
Totally. Maybe I'll start with a little bit more description of what we do or what our place in the industry is. You look back 20, 25 years, and there is a really healthy network of small turboprop aircraft or 50-seat jets, maybe, in those days, flying people 50 to 250 miles to a major hub. As to your point, the pilot shortage and other cost pressures and really the fact that there's no modern turboprop platform less than 76 seats that's popular ... As all those kind of forces have converged, seats have just come out of this part of the business at a really staggering rate.
I had a lot of early exposure to it because when I worked at Alaska, I spent a lot of time with our Q400 network, our Horizon network. When I was at Surf Air as a Part 135 carrier, I think I had really early exposure to understanding what I thought the consequences of the pilot shortage would be, particularly as it relates to just one, literally getting bodies in seats, but two, what it would do to wages and how that disproportionately impacts small aircraft.
Yeah, when I was at Alaska, I remember meeting with Oxnard, California at the time. Later on in my life, I lived in LA ,and if you look back in the early 2000s, United ran Oxford-LAX six to eight times a day on a Embraer 120. In that period from the early 2000s to 2015, Ventura County had doubled in population size, and GDP per capita had massively expanded as people got priced out of the LA core, and yet it had lost air service. You're like, well, all ... If I just covered my eyes, and I knew nothing else about the airline industry, it seems like this market should have gotten more service, not less. Of course, it's close to other airports, but the reason it didn't get any service is just markets like that, where there's alternatives, and there's a really big drive market, they just no longer became the highest best use of an aircraft in a world where you're constrained on pilots and the cost structure of flying a small plane a short distance just doesn't make any sense.
All these little sensitivities like, oh, there's airports nearby that offer competing service, or if I don't have the perfect schedule, people are probably going to get in their car. All these little things basically chip away at the business case when there's not a really cost-effective platform with the right number of seats to take you to the hub.
When Landline started, the vision was really simple. It was, let's look at all the markets like Oxnard and all the markets that may become like that down the road as regional pilot supply pressures increased and the 50-seat jets were retired, and let's find a way to serve those communities with service to the nearest hub airport.
From my, I guess, childhood reading flight schedules or just obsession, the industry knew about old bus services that existed, Beaumont-Houston, Newark-Allentown. Lufthansa had a network in Germany or maybe has one still. To me, that seemed like a really interesting way to solve this problem. I think at one point, I sourced quotes from party bus companies for a hypothetical flight schedule, looked at the direct operating cost structure, and really, I mean couldn't believe my eyes the difference in what it cost to fly a 50-seat jet versus drive a 50-seat vehicle.
The hypothesis was really straightforward. It was like, here's a much lower cost per seat platform, doesn't have wings, it's a little different, but at the end of the day, if you can allow the airline to extend its network back to this origin point, and you can bring these people into the hub to make connections to the rest of the network, you can do so at 70% less cost per seat. How does that not make sense?
We set out to build, basically, a regional carrier that had expertise in a different fleet type than everybody else. That vision has grown a lot and changed a lot as we've existed over the years, but that was really the core mission at the beginning. If you kind of mapped out what you would need to do that, you have to be super reliable, you have to have an amazing onboard experience because I'd say it's common knowledge that people in the United States don't generally have a great view of bus transportation. You have to be able to connect seamlessly into an airline's passenger service system. Ideally, you could pass bags back and forth to the connecting flight, and then at the time, there was sort of this pie-in-the-sky, last-slide-in-the-deck idea that maybe someday we could even get people to go through security before they got on the motor coach, and they can make an airside connection at the hub. That hopefully captures your question of the market dynamics that gave us the opportunity and sort of how we got started.
Tom Fitzgerald:
I think it was a great overview, and I think it's a really exciting ... Electric air taxis, and obviously, the product is really compelling or could be really compelling, and there's a lot of sizzle there, and it captures a lot of media attention, but this was a very realistic, concrete idea that you guys were able to ... You saw the market opportunity, and have already launched and are scaling it as we speak versus coming back in the pandemic when a lot of the electric air taxis were de-SPACing. They were hoping to be ubiquitous by this point in time, and it takes a while. A lot of that stuff is more pie-in-the-sky, where this is a real opportunity that is out there today. Kudos to you guys. I think Sun Country was your first partner, right, prior to the end of 2019, is that correct?
David Sunde:
Yeah, exactly. On your air taxi point, I think this is one of my favorite topics, but I think, at this point, we're all trying to do the same thing, which is how do you integrate the last a hundred miles of transportation into an airline network seamlessly? It's just that outside of conventional air travel, the product segmentation involves more equipment choices maybe than seat choices. We very much think of ourselves not necessarily as a bus company, but as a sort of network utility provider. I think there's a different customer profile and a different cost per seat for different times and places.
With Sun Country, which you're right, was our first airline customer and still is a customer today, has been a huge supporter of us and really can't thank the team there and the people that have helped us over the years at Sun Country enough. Our goal was basically to prove that people would book a multimodal itinerary and do it again, enjoy it, that basically it would work, long story short. Our Sun Country's customer base obviously very price-focused, and so it was going to be harder for them with an all 737 fleet to really effectively serve places like Duluth and St. Cloud and Rochester at least seven days a week with a larger plane. We could deliver their incredible fare offering to a lot more people by offering a bus connection. We've done that now for years. That was our initial validation. Unfortunately for us, we launched that service on November 4th, 2019.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Great timing.
David Sunde:
Yeah, exactly. I mean basically a hundred days before the world shut down, but sometimes that's just how it goes.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Yeah, I mean the airline, even in the best of years, as we've seen this week ... We're recording this the week of November 7th for the audience at home, but there's never a dull day in the aviation industry. There's always some curve ball getting thrown at you, but keeps it interesting.
David Sunde:
Totally.
Tom Fitzgerald:
What was it was like working with all the different stakeholders, whether airlines, airports, safety regulators, the customers, just kind of getting them to buy into this product, and to your point earlier on, Americans not jumping up and down for the idea of a bus on the surface, but I think just ... I haven't tried your product myself, but just on the website it's a very ... I don't think it's the image that someone would have in mind of a bus transport. It's a very nice coach bus, just got your airline customer's livery on the outside of it. It looks very professional. Love to hear just how you got them to make that leap of faith in your early days.
David Sunde:
It's a great question. I don't even know where to start because I think one of the reasons it's so difficult to truly innovate in the air transportation space, and I don't mean start a new route or launch a new seat back product or something, I mean truly do something different, is because you have to convince so many different parts of the chain that what you want to do is maybe outside the normal scope of operations, but it's still going to be safe, it's still going to be secure, customers are still going to like it, and ultimately, it's going to work. I think in the early days of Landline, it was a mix of convincing people that it would actually work, that people would get on the Landline vehicle and not be upset or outraged. It was convincing smaller airports that this was good for them.
You have a group of people that have had a lot taken away. You show up in 2019 with a piece of paper, and you're 27, and you're trying to convince them that, hey, I know you're an airport, and I know things have changed, but I promise that this bus is the path back to a healthy future. It's not the easiest, most slam dunk sales pitch from their perspective.
In the early days, I think any entrepreneur would tell you this, it's just a lot of finding the people who are open-minded and trust your vision. We had an amazing partnership early on with the Duluth airport, and the airport director there definitely took a risk on us and that was a relationship I built over a long time and a lot of discussions and maybe a couple beers and just a lot of ... Because I truly do and did believe what I was saying, just a lot of trying to help him understand what the upside could be and how the downside is mitigated. I think if you're a small airport in 2019, and someone's showing up with a bus, you ask yourself the question, well, if I do this, will an airplane ever come back or am I bound to this forever?
Tom Fitzgerald:
I think we've actually seen the opposite of that, but back then, it was a lot of convincing people your vision. I think as we've grown as a company and continue to execute, continue to survive a lot of challenges, then I think your track record, to some extent, starts to speak for itself. You obviously continue to build those relationships and bring people along, but when you do what you say you're going to do over and over again, people start to take you more seriously.
I think we have not taken whatever the Uber approach of show up and break all the rules and fix them later. I don't think you can do that in this particular space. This has been, in a good way, a hard-fought, collaborative effort to try to help people understand why this is in their best interest. At the end of the day, my belief about Landline has always been that yes, it's a bus, and I know it's different, but there's really no difference from a ... If you just think about an airline network as a math problem, it's so good for the whole system. When you have an airport like Wilmington or even Duluth that has really peaky TSA lines with airplanes, but a lot of times in the middle of the day, you could put that capacity back into use, and you can push people away from congested hubs, it's good for ... Everybody wins. It's certainly a little bit of a leap of faith to believe that that systemic change is actually going to happen.
On the customer side, for us, it's always been about reliability and a really good hard product. To some extent, you're probably not going to win the battle with Facebook ads or a marketing campaign that's going to convince people that they're going to love buses tomorrow. Unfortunately, I think the legacy of Greyhound in the United States has kind of drawn that one back, but I mean Greyhound's A14. I think it's different now that FlixBus owns them, but back in the day their A14 was like 60%.
Oh, my God.
David Sunde:
Our five-year average A14 at this point is probably in the mid-90s. Reliability was always super important to us. We knew that maybe if people were skeptical or maybe they didn't know that they book a bus when they actually booked the ticket, because not everybody reads the fine print, if you could get on the vehicle, and it was just an awesome experience, it was comfortable, it was well-thought-out, there's Wi-Fi, there's NC power, it felt like the premium cabin of an RJ, that that would kind of capture anyone's discontent. I think that's been a really effective strategy for us. Sometimes, the people sitting in the seat or who are planning to sit in the seat are easier to convince that what I'm saying is true than the decision makers at airlines and airports. Sometimes, you just have to see it to believe it. Certainly as a conceptual idea, I think it's sometimes harder to grasp.
Tom Fitzgerald:
For the passenger, off the top of my head, being on the bus where you're communicating with the airline, and they don't have to worry about handling their own parking or transportation to a major hub, but just what are some of the other benefits, value that's getting added for the actual passenger on the bus?
David Sunde:
At a very basic level, the customer we want on the bus is probably somebody that drove themselves to the airport. In general, we're really truly not trying to compete with air service, generally speaking. We don't really think of ourselves as competing directly with an airport shuttle service when they do exist in markets that we're in. We're in this because we think that our better product and our better distribution capability can get more people off the road. The thing I maybe didn't mention when we were talking about the supply coming out of these small markets is that even when there was supply there, one of the things that I think people underestimate the most is the true market size of a lot of these places. If you use cell phone data to look at how many people are driving, even when there's air service, the market usually was ... The air service market was capturing maybe 20, 25% of the total actual market.
We want to take people off the road, and if you're going to take people off the road, you've got to be better than their car, but how can you be better than their car? Well, you can be lower cost. In that case, you've got to be ... However they value their time, I suppose, or the inconvenience of driving, but most importantly, kind of hub airport parking, or the hub airport parking experience. A lot of times ... I'm in Fort Collins today. You're in Denver, you might not even be parking at Den. You might be parking two miles away anyway, so why not start your trip in Fort Collins. You have to be more comfortable than you in your car, so the seat has to be great, and ideally, you have to actually give the person a chance to have that time back, so you have to have a sturdy tray table. Early in the Landline days, we were obsessed with bus tray tables because it took us a couple times to actually find one that was sturdy enough and big enough to actually work on.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Like a laptop.
David Sunde:
Yeah, exactly. My co-founder, Ben Munson, and I used to basically do a laptop test for tray tables. Finally, you have to be reliable. If you cancel, if you're late and people miss their flight, then they're probably going to go back to their car next time. This is one where you can really mess it up if it goes sideways, but you can actually win in markets that people maybe are otherwise skeptical of you.
A question I still get all the time is what happens when there's a lot of traffic? To be honest with you, I actually embrace and love markets where there's a ton of traffic because what that does is if you're driving yourself, you're going to add all this extra buffer time because you're worried about hitting traffic and not making your flight. It adds all this extra stress and noise in your mind, and we can take all that from you. Especially when we're partnered with an airline, and we can rebook you if something goes wrong, there's sort of an implied insurance product there that adds a lot of value.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Oh, yeah, just not having to deal with the stress of driving yourself versus okay, I'm on the bus, but I'm working, to your point earlier. I think definitely on the passenger side with the mainline carriers, we've seen a big trend of people ... It's not a commoditized product and people do value, hey, is my experience going to be more seamless, stress-free, more creature comforts, what have you? I think that fits very well in that broader secular theme.
David Sunde:
Totally.
Tom Fitzgerald:
That's great context. I'm just kind of curious, in your early days with Sun Country, and then just as you've scaled the business and partnered with American and Air Canada, how the different partnerships have worked? What have some of the early learnings been? Anything that surprised you a lot, that you thought would be a home run that wasn't as impactful, or things you weren't expecting that ended up becoming really mission critical?
David Sunde:
So many learnings. I'll try to distill to the ones that are interesting for listeners. In the early days, we would start a new market, and even though we were starting with more frequency than maybe a CRJ200 would, we still were pretty light relative to what you'd see an airport shuttle starting with, right? We would be 5x and a competing ground transportation service would be like 25x.
Part of our hypothesis was always that if you had airline distribution kind of organizing demand around the banks, you wouldn't have to be so inefficient running 25 trips a day that were 30% full. It turns out that the S-curve is still very much alive for us, and now we really try to move in the direction of getting markets to 6 to 12 frequencies per day. Here in Fort Collins, where we run a little bit different business now, we're at 17, so we are trying a different strategy here, but Kitchener to Toronto will go up to 12 frequencies a day or 10 frequencies a day, excuse me, next month. You see us with our American partnership increasingly starting new markets with more scheduled depth because the more banks you can hit, the better the service is going to do. Maybe that's not shocking to any of your listeners, but I guess it's sort of a finding that midpoint between what it was and what a bus company would normally do, I think, has been an important one for us.
I'd say one big lesson I've learned is just around distribution. Of all the things that create really not barriers to innovation in the airline business, maybe distribution isn't the top one on your list, but the architecture of how airline tickets are sold is really inflexible. There's also so much entrenched consumer behavior. Maybe there's a great market that you really want to start, but the airport code for the airport in that market hasn't been used in 20 years. So everybody living in that area, even though it perfectly fits the demographic profile, they've booked the hub airport code for the last quarter-century. Reteaching them how to book a new airport code is really hard. What we consistently see is when there's active airport code behavior, the route almost instantaneously works. When there's not, there's a 6 to 18 month curve of teaching people how it works.
You think about why is it so hard to get the last mile and the middle miles to talk? A lot of it is because the booking behaviors are completely opposite of each other. If I'm booking an airline ticket, I'm probably booking ... Well, to be fair, I book airline tickets 24 hours in advance, but I think for most people it's 2, 3, 4 weeks at this point, less than it was historically, but still it's not tomorrow. People think about how they're going to get to their hub airport flight the day before or maybe the hour before, and they certainly don't think about putting an airport code in. You think about the future of electric aviation or electric air taxis, whatever is going to go back into that world, whether it's us or someone else, the real value is actually owning the retraining of all that booking behavior onto your platform.
I think one of the reasons airlines work with us, particularly in markets like at Trenton or Wilmington where there's less of that entrenched booking behavior, is that if you take a little bit longer-term perspective, then as the market matures, you're able to build a really loyal base of customers that are always going to come to you first.
I think maybe I hadn't connected the dots as to why is it so difficult to create seamlessly integrated new modalities that connect airlines? Well, it's really difficult to create new endpoints in an airline network that people actually know how to book, so you've got to find another way. Either you have to get really good at working with the community to help them build that customer behavior again, or you have to find some other way to be integrated. That's going to be a hurdle for us that we spend a lot of time thinking about. It's going to be a hurdle for any of the EVTOL operators in the future to the extent they care about this. It's not an easy one to overcome.
Tom Fitzgerald:
No, I mean that makes a ton of sense as you explain it, but that's a fascinating point on the airport code and the divergence in customer behavior. I'm curious if you've seen any kind of similarities or differences on either side of the border just with your partnership with Air Canada versus the US. I don't know if there's any different secular dynamics going on up north or what your experience has been there.
David Sunde:
In Canada, they have a sort of a similar, I'd say parallel supply and demand imbalance in regional markets. There's been a similar kind of pulling back of regional capacity. It's obviously a little bit ... It's a smaller market, a little different market. The opportunities that we see in general are a little bit longer stage length than what we typically do in the US. The thing that I think is the most interesting is just the general perception of multi-modality in a bus and stuff. It's not that we don't worry about it. I mean, we have a great product, so people love it, but it's a much more natural thing in Canada, I think, for people to be totally cool and maybe even excited about getting on a bus. I think that's been an interesting one. Maybe, I guess, going back to the combining your two questions here. Sorry, Tom, I'm all over the place, but ...
Tom Fitzgerald:
No, it's all good, yeah.
David Sunde:
Maybe one of the other things that we've learned that's been really very surprising to me is I would've told you that the average, the best stage length for us was 45 minutes to two hours, and it turns out it's more an hour to three or four hours. We've successfully operated four-hour trips.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Wow.
David Sunde:
Two, two and a half hours has many times worked out for us. I think if you dig deeper into this, it's a little bit that people think that it's stage length that really matters to the customer, but I think it's actually more of a function of what are your alternatives and how isolated are you as a community. If it's a four-hour stage length, but man, there's really not great other options, and you can save people a lot of money, then that route's going to work perfectly. Whereas if it's a 45-minute trip, and there's just a lot of other modalities to compete with, it's going to be a little bit harder. Typically in Canada, I think the future ... I look ahead. The two markets we started with are shorter. We just added Kingston, which is on the longer side. I think going forward, the kind of depth of opportunity there is going to be a little bit longer stage length, so a little bit more like the Midwest, I suppose, than the East Coast.
Tom Fitzgerald:
I would've bet dollars to doughnuts, it would've leaned on the shorter side or maybe one to two hours, all those equal. That's really interesting, but it makes a lot of sense just on the overall opportunity and what other options are out there. Earlier in our conversation, you were talking about the airside to airside capability and kind of that being the last slide when you guys were founding the company, but I know today now, that that's obviously been a big home run for you guys in Philadelphia. I'd love to maybe talk a little bit about that, all the work you guys did with TSA and airport security to build that up and your plans for that for the future.
David Sunde:
It's definitely one of the coolest parts of our business. Still today, when I take our service in Chicago or Philly with our partners at American, when you're sitting on a vehicle, if you're sitting nearby someone that's never done it before, and the bus is entering the hub airport AOA, just watching their eyes, they almost can't believe it's possible. I think they truly get the sense of like, wow, this feels like magic, which is a great thing to have in a product, when people feel like they've found a cheat code. They found a thing no one else knew about, and it is super cool, right? You love airplanes, I love airplanes. You're on a motor coach sitting up high, driving on the tarmac. It's awesome.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Right, absolutely.
David Sunde:
In addition to the obvious benefit of avoiding hub airport security when it's complicated, this was another one of these long-term, think strategically how you need to build a track record and build the right relationships. We were talking to TSA really early on about this. Of course, I think a lot of times you talk to a big regulator, and there's openness to an idea, but they're usually not going to do anything until they have a high level of comfort that what you're proposing is not too risky, and that you can really do it.
In the early days, we were just keeping them in the loop on our progress, and we started incrementally. First with Sun Country, we did bags. In 2021, we launched a partnership with United in Denver, and we did bags, and we went airside in one direction. Then we launched with American, and we did bags and airside went in one direction, and we announced our intention to go both ways.
Between that long process of making sure that we were always talking to our stakeholders at TSA, to the extent we could as a non-airline, really trying to communicate the track record we built, I think that was an effective strategy. Then, you can't say enough about how great it's been to work with American and their security team on really making this happen. I think at the end of the day, you needed our track record, and you needed a really strong partnership between us and a big carrier to work with TSA to get it done.
Now, again, just thinking about the future of this, it's the same thing. We do this, what is it, 48 times a day. It's 24 round trips, so 48 times a day, every day in Philly, and now we do in Chicago. It's that same mentality of just do what you say you're going to do, build a track record that says that you can do this effectively at scale in multiple complex environments. My belief is that that will unlock a really interesting future where you can start to become a little bit less about backfilling regional airline capacity and a little more about being an infrastructure, an additive kind of infrastructure provider to big airports. Obviously, buses don't need runways. I think I've made that joke too many times at this point, so it's a little tired.
Tom Fitzgerald:
It's a good one.
David Sunde:
I'm just saying it to you as like, no joke. That's just straight fact now.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Right. Yeah, it's true.
David Sunde:
I'll have to find a new bit. Buses don't need runways, and if you can move people behind security between two points, you can effectively create more lobby space for an airport. To some extent, the scale of what we do now in Philly is so big relative to where we started. We are moving a material number of people out of the Philly lobby. Also, I should say that hub airports are a big part of this. Philadelphia has been an incredible partner to us. They're very supportive. They talk about the positive impact we have on their lobby space and the regional communities around them. I think there's a way bigger vision here where you could build a network of remote screening checkpoints, adjacent to big airport screening checkpoints, that just help an airport that literally physically cannot expand its real estate footprint and can do so using what we do.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Oh, yeah.
David Sunde:
Whether that's for events like the World Cup next year or the Olympics in 2028. I'm really excited about that. I'd say the other thing is you think about the future of electric aviation and EVTOLs, and I do think ... I like to joke about it because it's fun to talk about the fact that we carry a ton of people today, and we're here and now, and they're still kind of pie-in-the-sky, but that is coming. That will happen, I'm sure. What won't change between now and then is every hub airport being super space constrained. I think a lot about a world where do all these kind of future mobility solutions need to operate out of a terminal that's off airport and kind of be connected airside to the big airport? An EVTOL is only going to make sense if you can clear security before you board it. I don't really see airlines giving up premium gate space in their biggest gateways for aircraft that have four seats.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Yeah, they don't have it to spare.
David Sunde:
Where can you actually help make that market possible by creating a connected, secure layer of infrastructure next to a big airport that can accept all this new mobility stuff in an easier way, if that makes sense?
Tom Fitzgerald:
I think it's brilliant. There's clearly a lot of white space. I'm in the New York area. I think everyone who's been in and out of New York, when there's delays or weather events, that can back up very quickly, but any of the major 20 plus hubs in the United States ... You're obviously an international company now, but globally, whether it's in Canada or abroad, I think this is not a unique problem to just even the major hubs in the US. This is pretty ... It's definitely going to be a major theme in the coming years of just the congestion, whether it's just on urban roadways in these big hub airports and just how do you make the most efficient use of space and moving these flows of people in and out.
David Sunde:
Absolutely.
Tom Fitzgerald:
That's terrific. One of my last questions for you was just thinking about the vision of multimodal and last mile, so we closed up there, but David, this has been a fascinating conversation. I don't know if there's any other points you'd like to close with for our listeners today, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about the exciting things going on at The Landline Company.
David Sunde:
No, Tom, this has been awesome. Thanks for your time. I appreciate you having me on and letting me tell the story and look forward to keeping in touch. Again, appreciate it.
Tom Fitzgerald:
Yeah, of course. Thanks so much, David, and that'll be all for this episode of Wheels Up. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.