Absolutely correct. Yet even a broken clock is right twice a day (once a day in the military ). Eventually there will come a time when another recession hits and being over leveraged will matter.

And the problem with being too big to fail is that...well, it’s the whole premise behind the RLA. You aren’t a free agent, you are sort of a public utility, and the easy solution is bankruptcy where a decade of management failure can be eliminated in a single year by paying bond holders pennies on the dollar and cancelling labor contracts won through a decade of hard fought negotiations.

When half the country flies with you and the new management tells the NMB they need increased regional scope and a halving of their “excessive” CBA pay scales, who do you think the NMB and the politicians are going to listen to, the millions of people who fly on AA or the fifteen thousand guys flying for a legacy that all make four or five times the median family income?