If he shuts anything down, he will have to find some entity to replace that (not exactly like going shopping to the corner store for adequately staffed regionals these days), or abandon those seat miles, or have mainline do it. A CEO of a non-wholly owned will quickly shut down if they can't find a way to make some kind of money on something whether it's ground ops, flight ops, aircraft management, painting airplanes, doing contract heavy maintenance, cleaning toilets, whatever... SKYW and RAH are in a pinch because they have top-heavy longevity employees, not enough cheap new hires to staff current ops, and dealing with mainline CPAs that the mainline does not want to negotiate cost increases. But United is in a pinch too having been complicit in this failing contract lift system we have today, with companies slowly losing capability to support the work, and supposedly even paying fines to the mainline for various failures to do the work. So if that is true it quickly becomes stupid to stay in a business you cannot sustain. They tried to make it more sustainable by gutting both sides of the XJT contracts. Well that is not going to work, so the pinch goes on.

So what breaks first? I don't know. I don't really care. I am just not taking it in the nutz for 1 penny of concessions of ANY kind with the mainlines all raking in healthy profits because some airline business brains can't get together and make a system that is functional and pays airline pilots a decent living and offers a decent life (most regional jobs are no such thing). If they want a broken system with flights that cancel and no kids becoming pilots anymore, well fine, that seems to be their answer so far.