American? Good God man, USair and America Worst never completed their merger from 9 years ago. Dougie just ran them as separate airlines, and played the employees off against each other. Amazingly, he made good money doing it.

I would bet the combined American ends up being as big a cluster $uck as we are, maybe worse.

As far as IT systems, lUAL's did have a history of already operating an airline with 700 planes a 12,000 pilots. The only problem is it didn't really do that great a job.