Well of course... do you think that the shareholders would have bought off on the BK if AMR was like "Hey we are still printing money, but we want to get out of some leases on Fokker 100s so we are gonna declare BK."

It is true that eventually they would have gotten into trouble... I'm not saying they were all good. But its not like they were days or even months away from running out of cash. They needed to get out of Fokker and Maddog leases.