Four Airlines Is Not a Market

Flying used to be something people looked forward to. Now it's something you endure.

Josh Kantrow | August 1, 2026

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.

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.........

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