Gerald Laderman
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at United Airlines
Thanks, Andrew. Good morning everyone and welcome to our first call in the New Year. While we all would have preferred to be further along in the recovery, you will see from our results for 2021 and forecast for this year that we continue to make great progress and are well positioned to achieve the long-term goals we've discussed with you since last June.
Turning to the numbers. For the full-year 2021, we reported a pretax loss of $2.6 billion and an adjusted pretax loss of $5.8 billion. For the fourth quarter of 2021, we reported pre-tax loss of $845 million and an adjusted pretax loss of $679 million. Our CASM-ex increased 13% on capacity down 23% both versus the fourth quarter of 2019. While CASM-ex was within our guidance range for the quarter, it was slightly higher than the midpoint as a result of Omicron related expense.
Looking to the first quarter of 2022, there were two major factors impacting our CASM-ex. First because of Omicron as Andrew mentioned, we are adjusting capacity downwards to align with demand, consistent with the agile pivoting we've done throughout the crisis. Secondly, we currently expect that our 52 Pratt powered 777 will mostly remain grounded through the first quarter. This reduction in flying keeps our aircraft utilization down about 16% in the first quarter versus 2019 and does drive additional cost inefficiency.
First quarter 2022 capacity is expected to be down between 16% and 18% with CASM-ex expected to be up between 14% and 15% versus the first quarter of 2019. The math associated with flying fewer ASMs than originally expected together with the added Omicron related expense is driving around 3 points of expected CASM-ex pressure in the quarter.
By the fourth quarter of 2022 however, our base case assumption is that we are past Omicron and flying a schedule with capacity up around 5% versus fourth quarter 2019. In this scenario, our utilizations would reach near 2019 levels if gauge up about 16% versus the fourth quarter of 2019 and up 11.0 versus the first quarter of this year, driven by the return of CASM friendly 777's and the addition of 787's and larger 737 MAX aircraft.
These factors together with the full run rate benefit of our identified $2.2 billion in structural cost reductions, which we expect to achieve by this summer with driving material change in our CASM-ex performance over the course of the year from up 14% to 15% in the first quarter to down around 2% in the fourth quarter this year in each case compared to 2019. As I mentioned, these figures represent our current base case assumption for our 2025 [Phonetic] but as Andrew outlined, we are committed to aligning and we will continue to be flexible given the uncertainty around the pace of recovery.
As a result of this uncertainty, we expect our CASM-ex results for the full year 2022 could fall anywhere in a range of scenario. You may recall in October, we set our plan capacity for 2022 would be up around 5% versus 2019, with CASM-ex lower than 2019. Our outlook on CASM-ex remain consistent with this prior outlook though since we now expect our capacity for the year to be below 2019 levels, we must adjust our CASM-ex to take into account the impact of fixed costs spread over fewer ASM.
To provide some further book in, if capacity for the year were about flat to 2019, we expect our CASM-ex would be up 2% to 3% versus 2019. The full-year 2022 capacity is 5% below 2019, we expect our CASM-ex will be up about 5% versus 2019. We believe our results will land between those figures on a full-year basis. Most importantly, we expect CASM-ex to improve throughout the year as our gauge and aircraft utilization materially improve in the second half and expect to end the year with CASM-ex below 2019 levels as I noted earlier.
Most importantly, the fourth quarter expected run rate for CASM-ex will put us well on track for United Next cost plan for 2023 and beyond. Turning to fleet, we currently expect to take delivery of 53 737 MAX aircraft and eight 787 aircraft during the year. As we noted on our previous earnings calls, the 787 aircraft were originally expected to deliver in the first half of 2021. We now no longer expect to take these 787 aircraft until after the summer of 2022 contributing to about 1.5 point less capacity versus our original plan.
Given this timing, we now expect our adjusted Capex in '22 to be around $4.2 billion plus about $1.7 billion of adjusted Capex that moved out of '21 into 2022 for a total of about $5.9 billion for the full-year. To be clear, our total adjusted Capex plan for the years 2021 and 2022 together have not changed since June of last year, there is simply been a timing shift driven by aircraft delivery delay. We continue to expect the use a mix of debt financing leases and cash to fund the acquisition of new aircraft depending on market condition or tracking towards our United Next leverage target.
Importantly, we ended [Technical Issues] over $20 billion in liquidity including our undrawn revolver, a strong cash position we continue to navigate the remainder of the crisis. In closing, I'd like to thank my Finance team as they have worked countless hours over the last two years to create and manage a flexible financial plan in response to a quickly evolving environment. We will continue to focus on appropriately managing our capacity and rebuilding our business back efficiently. We've observed that the impact of each variant on our business has decreased with each iterations and we continue to expect COVID-19 to become endemic in the future. We remain confident in our 2023 and 2026 United Next financial target and our trajectory to maximize earnings power through the long-term in the coming years.
And with that I'll pass it back to Kristina to start the Q&A.
