Kirby's Dream, Our Nightmare

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Kirby’s Dream, Our Nightmare April 2026

The other day, news broke that United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby had floated the idea of merging United with American Airlines. On paper, I suppose that is the kind of thing that makes bankers sit up straighter, consultants start sharpening pencils, and Wall Street begin hallucinating about “synergies.” Out in the real world, however, it should make the average airline passenger want to grab the nearest airsickness bag.

Because if your answer to the current state of U.S. air travel is, “Let’s have even less competition,” then you are not trying to fix the problem. You are trying to formalize it.

Anyone who flies with any regularity already knows the score. Service is down. Fees are up. Legroom is treated like a luxury product. Schedules are padded. Routes are trimmed. Customer loyalty programs have been transformed from rewards for frequent flyers into giant financial engineering machines that seem to exist mainly to sell points to banks. Increasingly, the airlines feel less like transportation companies and more like credit card marketing platforms with wings attached as an optional accessory.

And now we are supposed to entertain the idea that combining two of the largest carriers in the country would somehow improve things.

Please.

The United States airline industry already behaves like an oligopoly in much of the country. At far too many airports, the notion of meaningful nonstop competition is a joke. You can often fly nonstop on one dominant carrier, maybe two if you are lucky, and everybody else sends you through a connection somewhere inconvenient if it’s even possible. In those environments, pricing becomes a game of “because we can.” Consumers do not have real choice. They have variations on captivity.

So when someone says the answer is to create an even bigger airline, my response is simple: if that is the direction we are going, then let us at least be honest about it.

Do not pretend this is still a healthy private market.

Do not tell me this is robust competition.

Do not give me a speech about consumer benefits while simultaneously reducing the number of real alternatives available to consumers.

If United and American genuinely want to become one giant national champion, then maybe we should stop halfway measures and go all the way. Sell the whole thing – Delta and the rest included – to the U.S. government. Eliminate the fiction that this is some kind of vibrant free-market ecosystem. Fold it into a public utility model. Call it United States of America Airlines and be done with it.

Ridiculous? Yes. But not quite as ridiculous as continuing to tell the public that serial consolidation is somehow pro-consumer.

At least a government-owned airline would be honest about what it is.

And before the usual crowd starts shouting that government ownership always produces disaster, let us calm down and look around the world. There are state-backed or state-linked airlines that are run quite well, and there are state-backed or state-linked airlines that are run poorly. In other words, they look suspiciously like privately owned airlines. Competence still matters. Management still matters. Route strategy still matters. Customer experience still matters. Ownership structure alone does not magically create excellence, but neither does private ownership. American aviation has spent years proving that point with great enthusiasm.

That is the part I find most revealing here. We are constantly told that the private sector is the gold standard because competition disciplines bad behavior. Fine. Then where exactly is the discipline now? Where is the competition?

Where is it when service keeps getting worse?

Where is it when the passenger experience becomes a laboratory experiment in how much discomfort people will tolerate before giving up?

Where is it when airlines can make more strategic fuss over co-branded credit cards and loyalty monetization than over whether the basic act of flying is pleasant, reliable, and humane?

The dirty little secret of the modern airline industry is that flying people around is most definitely the side hustle. The glamour business is miles, points, partnerships, and financial extraction. The plane is still there, of course, because it has to be. But too often it feels like the flying exists to feed the loyalty machine, not the other way around.

That is one reason the merger idea lands so badly. Passengers are already frustrated. They already suspect that the system is designed around shareholder priorities first, executive ambition second, and customer welfare somewhere down near the bottom, probably in the overhead bin where there is no room left. Floating a United-American merger at this moment is basically telling the public, “You think this is shitty now? Hold my boarding pass.”

And let us be clear about one more thing: this would not be a merger designed to rescue some broad public good. It would be a merger designed to create scale, bargaining power, and market leverage. Those are wonderful things to have if you are the airline. They are usually lousy things to face if you are the traveler.

The defenders will say a larger airline could compete better against foreign carriers. Maybe. They will say it could create a stronger global network. Also maybe. They will say there would be efficiencies. There are always “efficiencies.” That word tends to mean fewer overlapping operations, fewer flights in some markets, fewer employees, and fewer choices for customers, all wrapped in a PowerPoint presentation with a majestic blue gradient that gets Wall Street excited.

What it rarely means is a suddenly more delightful trip for the person in seat 29B.

So here is my counterproposal. If the airline industry wants to keep consolidating until it effectively resembles a national transport cartel, then stop pretending that private ownership is preserving some sacred consumer paradise. Either preserve real competition, or admit that the game is over and regulate the resulting giant like the essential infrastructure it increasingly resembles.

Personally, I would rather see a market with more competition, more point-to-point options, and more pressure on carriers to win passengers through service rather than trap them through geography and loyalty schemes. But if the industry insists on building one giant flag carrier by attrition and merger, then I am at least open to the radical honesty option: make it public, make it accountable, and strip the greed premium out of the equation.

Would that be better? Maybe. Worse? Also maybe.

But at least it would stop insulting our intelligence.

Because the worst possible outcome is the one we keep drifting toward now: a supposedly private system with public bailouts for every crisis, shrinking competition in normal times, mounting customer misery, and executives still insisting that the answer is even less choice than we already have.

That is not a free market. That is a rigged boarding process.

Oh yes, and one more thing. If we do nationalize the U.S. airline industry, none of the current executives should be allowed to stay involved. Let them cash out and retire somewhere – preferably as far away from passengers as possible – and let the profit motive once and for all be removed from the system.

Maybe service will improve, maybe it will degrade, but at least neither will happen because some C-suite puffed shirt thought his quarterly bonus would be higher by doing it.

(By the way, Kirby’s United – American rumor got so loud that American Airlines had to issue a statement that they had nothing to do with it…and are not interested.)

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!