Douglas Harned
Bernstein Institutional Services LLC, Research Division

I'm Doug Harned, Bernstein's Global Aerospace and Defense analyst. And I'm thrilled to have back with us today John Plant, Chairman and CEO of Howmet. And with that, we're going to get started here.

Douglas Harned
Bernstein Institutional Services LLC, Research Division

So John, I think to start off here, maybe you can just give us a little bit of overview of where Howmet stands right now and what some of the opportunities and challenges you're facing are?

John Plant
Executive Chairman & CEO

Okay. So first of all, good morning, everybody. Look forward to chatting with Doug today and giving you some insights to Howmet. We seem to be at, I would say, a point where the opportunities do outweigh the challenges at the moment. Having said that, I mean sometimes the opportunities themselves bring challenge in being able to step up to them. We're at this moment in time where in our commercial aerospace side of the business, the backlogs for commercial aircraft are extraordinary highs, and that gives us some feeling of security of improved volumes for the future and with aircraft manufacturers predicting increasing rates.

So that's good and helpful to us in terms of the growth vector for the company. Also in aerospace, the defense budget seemed to be solid. And given the use of aircraft, especially recently, then there appears to be the opportunity for additional spares coming up in the next 2 or 3 years. And then at the same time, given also the use of missiles and the potential for