My bet is the merger mania will start with LCC's first. Big LCC buying smaller ones and Legacy buying smaller LCC's. Once those mergers are completed and skybus and virgin are put out of business the "new" legacy's will merge among themselves.

whether it will be SWA buying Airtran, AA Alaska, DAL or UAL buying JB, NWA buying Frontier or Spirit or any combination in between is anyone guess.

the "legacy" carriers will not merger until the bigger LCC's have been absorbed and use to take out the new entrants. they will ink deals like the one between KLM-Airfrance with DAL and NWA, which is more than code share and has antitrust immunity but stops short of merging. Once they can "prove" to the government that the removal of the LCC's and the new alliances are not bad for the american public ( more expensive tickets) then they will be allow to merge.

My time line is 12months for setting up those alliances with antitrust immunity,18 months for the buyout of LCC's, 48 months for the legacy mergers, 72 months for us all to get really fat contracts.