Hi, it's Glenn, and it's the 22nd of November. As I said on last week's call, I have asked Rick Poulton, head of Strategic Sourcing and Business Improvement Initiatives, to join us on the call today.

Just as Graham Atkinson, our head of Worldwide Sales and Alliances, talked last week about the changes and improvements in his division, Rick is going to talk to us today about the restructuring and business transformation work in his area of responsibility. The commitment and accountability for restructuring and transforming United runs across the entire organization, in every corporate function, as well as every aspect of our operations.

Our business plan captures these profit and cost improvements, and every leader has the responsibility to deliver against that plan.

We'll be updating everyone on the call regularly on the results and progress we are making across the company, using this call, NewsReal, and employee meetings. So, now, over to you, Rick.

Rick Poulton: Thanks, Glenn, and thank you for the opportunity to speak on the call today.

A theme that Glenn has continually reiterated on this call, in employee meetings and especially in officer meetings, is the theme of personal accountability. So, I want to start by telling you what I am accountable for, and that is realizing the maximum value possible for our company through our supplier relationships.

About a year and a half ago, Glenn and Pete McDonald challenged me to re-launch the company's purchasing efforts using a more sophisticated, proactive strategic sourcing approach. While the name strategic sourcing may sound like consultant gobbly-gook, it actually stands for something much more tangible -- all geared toward realizing more value from our supplier relationships.

You'll notice that I continue to use the word value. I chose this word purposefully, as it means more than just lowest unit price. We are focused on total cost of ownership, including cash flow, operational reliability, customer impact and end of contract risk -- this is not too different from the total consideration each of you bring to buying decisions in your personal life. But the key to smart buying is to combine solid analytics with functional expertise, and my group has partnered with various operating divisions at the company over the last 18 months to create this 1-2 combination. While there is not enough time in this call to list every deal or recognize each person involved, I would like to share some of our successes in several of our functional areas of spend.

Jet Fuel

Let's start with jet fuel. All of you are familiar with the recent run up in fuel prices. However, you are less familiar with some of the complexities we face in getting enough fuel where we need it. In short, we cannot buy sufficient amounts of fuel at reasonable prices in our hubs and line station locations. And given our hub layout, this is actually a challenge somewhat unique to United, even amongst the network carriers.

To overcome this challenge, we've shipped in most of our fuel historically, but this fuel in inventory and fuel in the pipelines, required lots of cash. Recently we did a deal with Morgan Stanley that allowed us to free up all this cash, allowed us to rebuild our inventories to protect the operation, and also allowed us to benefit from our combined market presence through trading opportunities, therefore lowering our net effective cost.

Airport Services

Another example is Airport Services. We partnered with the Airport Operations Division to aggregate for the first time our U.S. and European demand for airport-related services and supplies. This effort focused on concentrating suppliers and simplifying and standardizing our requirements. The net result of this effort was we reduced our annual cost by approximately 40 million dollars per year, and we've also partnered with Lufthansa to continue to introduce additional competition in Germany and other locations, where competition is slim.

In-flight Entertainment

The third example is our in-flight entertainment. We joined forces with our Onboard Product Planning Group in the Marketing Division to review our in-flight entertainment offering. By using an economic analysis predicated on customer research, we resisted the urge to copy other U.S. domestic and international carriers with expensive "live" or on-demand solutions. Instead, we secured five million dollars annually in savings from our content partners and put in place a strategy to swap out our onboard tape players for inexpensive digital servers. This will both lower our annual operating costs and allow for better passenger experience through improved content delivery and control.

IT/Telecom

The fourth example is our IT and telecom expenses. We partnered with our ISD Division to restructure every significant telecom relationship and take advantage of the intense competition that exists in these markets. In particular, we focused on getting suppliers to fund replacements to our outdated network and computer infrastructure while still lowering our annual costs. Additionally, through a series of negotiations, we have put in place the pieces that will allow a massive migration of our Reservations platform to a new common platform along with several of our Star Alliance partners, yet at the same time we still reduced our current costs by more than 15 million dollars a year.

Maintenance

And, lastly, in Aircraft Maintenance functions, we are aggressively introducing competition to OEM parts pricing and we are focused on lowering our capital requirements in these areas.

All in all, we have reduced our annual operating costs by more than 300 million dollars a year, and still counting. Additionally, we have secured more than 400 million dollars in one-time cash flow benefits. And, lastly, we have pushed and we have used our influence to win at least two corporate travel accounts, and we think we have extended the notion of partnership to make sure that's a two-way street.

Despite these successes, we know we can do better. And every week, I get several e-mails from each of you outlining suggestions or with questions about some of our supply relationships. We value this feedback, welcome the input and invite you to keep up this correspondence through our Idea Center, which you can access on SkyNet. With that, back to you, Glenn.

Glenn: Thanks very much, Rick. The results that we are all hearing about on the call -- from Rick today, Graham last week and Scott Dolan a couple of weeks ago -- all add up to our understanding the outstanding performance in their areas of responsibility. All together, they show us the progress that we have made and the opportunity we also have in front of us. We continue to meet our goals and make improvements that we didn't think possible two years ago, or even a year ago.

All of this work, all of this hard work, is an investment in United's future. And all the work with remaining issues that must be resolved for us to complete our restructuring and exit bankruptcy, we're going to do whatever we need to protect this work, as an asset of the company, and to ensure that our customers continue to choose United because they know our commitment to them.

Next week, Larry De Shon is going to join me on the call, and we're going to talk about all of the improvements in Airport Operations, some of which Rick mentioned on his call.

I will close the call by thanking everyone for contributing to United's turnaround. For those of you in the United States, I wish you and your families a happy Thanksgiving. As we all know, this is one of our busiest times, and for those of you that are going to be working over the holiday, I want to say a special thank you.

Until the next time, when Larry De Shon joins me on the call, keep focused, stay United, and I will be talking to you again soon.