Even if that's the case, what the B-School crowd never considers is what happens after that. The industry wide "capacity discipline" that occurred during the last little crunch was an anomaly that we may never again see. Quite often when we reduce capacity, others increase in proportion or even in excess, including lower cost competitors.

Fortunately because of luck and timing beyond any executive team's control, Skubus, Maxjet, Eos and others are no longer an industry wide threat and some of the previous so called LCC's have been mitigated. SWA is at least a rational competitor now, AT is gone, JB has at least partially cost-matured and VA has been absorbed.

However more threats remain, such as ULCC's Allegiant and Frontier attempting endless growth mode into traditional markets, JB's rapid foray into mission critical legacy markets with premium products at yield crushing fire sale prices, ME3's possibly fake multi year self evaluation period which may end up resulting in nothing but more dual subsidized poaching of our markets, and labor busting/scab-adjacent schemes like NAI continue to metastasize.

Meanwhile we continue to light billions and billions and billions of dollars on fire that we'll never get back and will one day end up wishing we had, as we once again entertain the strategy of temporary savings at the cost of permanent marketshare, revenue and profits.

In any case I don't entirely disagree with the 88 accumulator theory to a point. Primarily because they are fuel and increasing MX hogs as well as noise and possibly nav issues as well.