Originally Posted by Bill Lumberg

From the LAX LEC letter:

The business model proposal by our management team remains confidential. At some point they may release more of their concepts. It is not the intent here to divulge any confidential information, so for now we will just refer to this as their “business plan.” Whenever one side has a significant need at negotiations, there is leverage for the other party. Delta’s business plan did provide us with leverage for these negotiations. The exact nature of the leverage may never really be known. What we do know is that this leverage was real - but perishable. Given enough delay, the leverage would evaporate and the opportunity would be lost. You may wish to read those two sentences again as they did play an important role in our final decision.