Actually I think this is a good thing for the most part. SWA will bring in mostly 130-ish seat planes into the market with sky high labor costs. After the new wears off the over advertised fare sales, they won't be able to gut yields out of that market at all. So in a way its significant fare protection for most markets. Which, by the way, will be more and more connecting. Fewer point to point routes on half empty RJ's means more connections through other hubs on mainlines.

JB will trash yields for a while, but even they will only trail a reasonable fare baseline by so much, and most or all of their routes will be to their hubs or FL.

Just like Parker warned, this puts the squeeze on the remaining smaller market directs, which the legacies will still dominate, while flooding an already saturated market with cheap seats to FL. The only real negative for the legacies is that JB will come in and absolutely nuke the yields on the Shuttle. Even if they do NYC to JFK, they will destroy the yields. There is clearly not the demand for 3 shuttle products, so someone will have to surrender. JB will bet that someone is DL and they may be right, but it appears DL may have a counterpunch after all.