I am an avid traveler and have been flying for most of my life. Business trips, family vacations, ski weeks, a recent multi-week swing through Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Air travel has changed from something approaching a service industry into something closer to a toll booth with wings. The seats got smaller, the fees multiplied, and the schedules got less reliable. And now the executives running these companies aren’t even trying to hide their ambitions.
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The Wall Street Journal reported last week that United CEO Scott Kirby personally called Delta CEO Ed Bastian last year to pitch a merger between the two airlines. Delta ran the numbers, did preliminary due diligence, and walked away. This came before Kirby’s already-known approach to American Airlines, which rejected him outright and said so publicly. Two attempts. Two of the three biggest carriers in the country. A man running one of the “Big Three” tried to buy or merge with the other two, back to back.
Delta and United together control something like half the domestic aviation market. Add American to either side of that equation, and you’re talking about a single company running the skies over this country almost unchallenged. A sitting airline CEO treated monopoly as a business plan, not a cautionary tale, and felt comfortable enough to say so out loud to a rival.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen under one party’s watch. Deregulation dates to 1978, the brainchild of Cornell economist Alfred Kahn, and was supposed to open the industry to competition on price and service. For a while it did. What followed instead, over the next three decades, was a wave of mergers that regulators of both parties approved. The Bush DoJ signed off on Delta-Northwest in 2008. The Obama DoJ approved United-Continental in 2010, then sued to block American-US Airways in 2013 before settling and letting it through months later. Deregulation opened the door to competition. Consolidation walked through it and shut the door behind itself.
The airplane manufacturers followed a similar path. The domestic market went from several passenger aircraft makers down to essentially Boeing, competing against Airbus abroad. That consolidation left Boeing without much pressure to keep its edge, and the results have been visible: the 737 MAX grounding, years-long delays on the 777X and 787 Dreamliner, and a wave of canceled orders shifting to an Airbus backlog that’s just as stretched. Aircraft costs are one of the largest line items in an airline’s budget. When the plane makers stop competing, the airlines that depend on them inherit the dysfunction, and so do the passengers.
None of this is new to anyone who’s flown long enough to remember what a hub monopoly looks like up close. In 1998, United owned Denver the way it now owns several of its hubs, and passengers got the usual results: chronic delays and lost luggage. One flier recalls a landing announcement that year thanking passengers for choosing the airline “when you have a choice,” and laughing out loud, because by then there wasn’t much of one.
I fly enough to notice the pattern today. Load factors are packed tight because there’s no competitive pressure to run a half-empty plane at a lower fare. Basic economy is engineered to be miserable enough to push you into a higher fare class. Elite status, once a meaningful perk, gets diluted every couple of years because the airline knows you have no better option. Part of the reason service keeps declining even as loyalty program membership keeps growing is that the loyalty program itself has become the business. By some accounts, Delta now earns more of its net income from its credit card partnership than it does from actually putting passengers in seats. When the real profit center is a co-branded Amex card, competing on the flying experience stops mattering much.
Some will argue, reasonably, that airlines are a scale business, that bigger carriers find real efficiencies in maintenance, crews, hubs, and aircraft purchasing. There’s something to that. But scale efficiency and competitive pressure are two different things, and only one of them protects the passenger. An airline can be efficient and still have no reason to pass any of that efficiency back to you if it knows you’ll fly them anyway.
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Kirby didn’t stop after Delta said no. He went to American, then reportedly took the idea to the White House, betting a friendlier administration might allow what the Biden DoJ would have blocked. Given the bipartisan pattern of approvals over the last two decades, he had reason to hope. A CEO doesn’t test the waters on a deal this size unless he believes the waters might let him through.
The Justice Department killed the JetBlue-Spirit deal in 2024 on antitrust grounds, and that was two smaller carriers trying to build one mid-sized competitor to the Big Three. If regulators wouldn’t allow that, a Delta-United or United-American combination should be dead on arrival. But a sitting CEO felt free to make the call anyway, which tells you where he thinks the guardrails actually sit. Regulators have a chance right now, before any formal filing exists, to say clearly that a Big Three combination is off the table.
Congress has a role too, and a narrow one it should actually use. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle claim to care about airline service, usually when a viral video of a bumped passenger or a canceled flight makes the news for a week. That attention should translate into a standing, bipartisan commitment that any attempt to merge two of the three dominant carriers gets opposed regardless of who controls the White House when the filing lands. Airlines calculate risk the way any other business does. Leave the political risk ambiguous, and someone will test it again. Make it explicit and the calculation changes.
I don’t expect the next merger, if it comes, to be blocked because Washington rediscovers antitrust enforcement on principle. I expect it to be blocked, if it’s blocked at all, because the fallout would be too obvious to ignore. Four airlines becoming three would be a headline nobody in either party could survive politically. That’s a thin reed to hang consumer protection on.
Flying used to be something people looked forward to. Now it’s something you endure, courtesy of four companies that know exactly how little they have to compete with each other to keep making money. My seat on that Hawaii flight and Kirby’s calls to Bastian and Isom come from the same place. When you have almost nowhere else to go, an airline doesn’t have to make you whole. It just has to make you go away.
The next time a United, Delta, or American executive picks up the phone to float a merger with a rival, the Justice Department shouldn’t need a public outcry to say no. It should already have said so, well before that call was ever made. Anything less just tells the next CEO to try again.
Josh Kantrow is a lawyer in Chicago, where he focuses on technology, privacy, and complex commercial litigation. He is a longtime contributor to American Thinker and writes on law, politics, travel, and culture at his Facebook page: facebook.com/share/1BLwcus4PR
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