Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Bob McAdoo from Avondale Partners.
Bob McAdoo – Avondale Partners
Thanks. Question, obviously the real challenge here is to try to figure out how long it takes you to get to breakeven. As we look at the expenses for the fourth quarter, I am trying to figure out are there any lines among the operating expenses where we have special items which would not be recurring, for example, the maintenance with the conversion of the airplanes, are there extra expenses there? Is your depreciation, this 8144 number, is that likely to be kind of a similar, ongoing number? Or are any other places in there where we've got some things where we can see that it's fairly straightforward that your ongoing operating expenses are going to come down some.
Jim Ream
You just got the million that you can look at there with the impairment of the fixed assets and the special charges. Obviously, that's not an ongoing, so that comes off. Really, probably the only expense item that we have right now is obviously our average seniority of our folks is increasing fairly dramatically from where it would have been just say in the spring of this year.
We're mostly, that's our biggest expense item are the folks that we have flying our aircraft, working on aircraft, running the airport. Just typically in our sector, we're going to have folks who have career pursuits that sort of drive them off to sort of work at other carriers as those opportunities present themselves.
Kind of the slowdown, both in the utilization of our aircraft and with every airplane operator out there not really adding anybody, you are clearly seeing a lot of pressure there that we would expect to unwind on us once the industry starts returning to normal. That's a big thing. The only other item we've got, we've got two months of our pay cuts in here, so there's probably another million and a half to $2 million improvement that would come out of expenses if you looked at the full three months of those being implemented for a full quarter.
The real leverage point here on the expense side is really going to be on the utilization side. All the fixed stuff is fixed. As folks start getting used more, we're going to have folks that have career pursuits that sort of drag them out the door and we can start bringing people in and drive down that average seniority.
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