^ this. It might sound tongue in cheek but it's tough to see an AS-B6 merger for several reasons, the least of which being fleet and brand issues. AS is strong on the west coast and Hawaii but B6 is stronger pretty much everywhere east of the Mississippi. AS surpassed B6 in passengers carried starting in 2016, it has a larger fleet, and it flies to more cities than B6 with more frequency overall, but "JetBlue" seems like a more recognizable name both nationally and internationally. B6 has almost 5 times the number of airframes that Virgin America had pre-merger, and their fleet is nearly as large as Alaska's; it was easy enough for Alaska to phase out a few dozen A319's and A320's and keep VX's new A321's but they simply couldn't do that easily or quickly with B6's 280+ bus frames, and it wouldn't make sense from a business perspective to do that anyway.

So does AS pull a Cactus and make B6 essentially Alaska in everything but name, and do they get over their hard on for 737's or do the same thing they did to VX and buy B6 then cannibalize the fleet, the routes and the customer base just to remove a near-peer competitor? My opinion - none of this happens. AS is too risk averse right now and B6 is not the same as VX for many reasons. More likely, AS buys Sun Country, gets an extra 40ish NG's plus some experienced pilots, keeps MSP for now to give OneWorld a larger presence there to compete with DL but gets rid of SY's focus cities, and takes over the Amazon Prime contract flying which might actually mesh with existing cargo/freight operations in the state of AK anyway.