If you think Atlas has too much debt for goodness sake don't look at American or UPS!
Debt-to-Equity:
AAWW - 113%
DAL - 72%
FDX - 100%
UAL - 140%
UPS - 530%
AAL - 638%
Debt and airlines go together like burgers and fries. Its an extremely capital intense business with very expensive machines that you can't just pay up front for. Keep in mind part of AAWW's business (Titan) is packaging aircraft leases as asset-backed securities so its basically a debt factory for Wall Street. Titan arranged a lot of the leases on the Amazon 767s and most of the 747s at Atlas. Every new jet means a big ol' chunk of debt on the books. Plus, with bond interest rates so low its standard operating procedure for all businesses to be loading up on debt. Its essentially free money at the moment.