along with career expectations, longevity, and status and category.

"We begin with a high-level view of the pre-merger airlines, their respective business models and the state of the airline industry in 2010. Simply put, United was, as of the merger date, one of a small group of the preeminent U.S. (and, for that matter, international) global carriers, with a highly evolved and extensive domestic route network, with multiple hubs, geographically well-dispersed and well-situated in strong local markets (Chicago-O'Hare, Washington-Dulles, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), feeding into a comprehensive international route system serving all major continents and geographic areas with a large fleet of widebody aircraft configured to accommodate both leisure, but more importantly, the more valuable premium business traffic.

For at least half a century, United has been one of the “big three” U.S. carriers, along with Delta and American. Post-deregulation, each of these carriers spearheaded a global alliance – Delta was a charter member of SkyTeam, American a founding member of Oneworld, and United a founder of what is the largest and most comprehensive airline alliance – Star Alliance.

Each of these three airlines had an extensive domestic footprint in O&D markets to complement its global reach. Separate and apart from its role in Star Alliance, United's worldwide reach, with its extensive route rights (many of which were limited and not available to others), its substantial portfolio of scarce slot and gate assets, and its highly developed and extensive sales organizations, could not be matched or replicated. Taken together, these assets produced a powerful global brand unequalled by any other U.S. airline.

Prior to the merger, Continental was a smaller network carrier with primarily domestic, narrow-gauge operations, with much smaller and less favorably located hubs (Houston, Newark, Cleveland, and Guam) and a smaller, less nationally-articulated domestic route system. Internationally, Continental had a patchwork of less valuable routes, served to substantial degree with narrowbody aircraft (including regional jets flown by regional partners) more typically found serving domestic markets and a heavy focus on low-yield leisure traffic. Thus, much of Continental's international presence in Latin America was made up of short-haul, narrowbody vacation (low yield leisure) traffic and service to destinations in and around the Caribbean and Mexico.14 In the Pacific, Continental's presence was mostly the remnants of Air Micronesia, which was basically a network of narrowbody commuter runs built around a Guam hub designed more to cater to the very low-yield “honeymoon traffic” from Japan and unconnected to traffic flows involving the mainland United States."