There were a lot of things in play at that time but personally, if you asked me to point to one boogey man then yes, it would be Skywest Inc. with the encouragement of Continental management. Continental had tried to use CHQ as leverage against XJT management for renegotiating the CPA rates. When that blew up in their faces (spectacularly!) CAL needed to cobble together a plan B that allowed them to at least somewhat save face and put them back in the driver's seat with respect to their regional feed. So along comes Skywest to play exactly the game CAL wanted and well, look who got left holding the bag.

In hindsight, it was probably the best possible outcome of all the terrible choices on the table at that time, but the rates that Skywest forced XJT into were just asinine and meant to do one thing: force XJT's hand and get Skywest's foot in the door with a big CAL CPA. We've, and by "WE" I mean everyone employed by Inc. (Skywest, XJT and ASA), have been living with the fallout since.