Originally Posted by gloopy

LOL there is no way on earth the LCC's would be able to shop the DL menu and take whatever they wanted as a penalty for DL bringing flying back in house. The absolute worse that could ever happen would be a limited divesture (and even then probably just an auction) and the legacy airlines would end up with most of what they had anyway. Even if there was a forced divesture with no opportunity to be the high bidder, AA, SW and UA would also be able to get some, and when they went through the same process, DL would be able to bid on some of that as well. To think it would be a JB/VX/NK bonanza is laughable.

In any case its not all or nothing. Even if DL is limited to current 70/76 seat caps, that's more than enough lift to cover any and every regional slot even theoretically in jeopardy, even if it came to that. Need to keep X amount of regional lift in LGA and DCA? Fine, we'll just pull the reduction in lift from MSP, SLC, CVG, ATL (possibly excluding the SKYW gates situation) and DTW instead. Nothing the DOJ can or will do about that. Done deal. Easy peasy.