I hear this idea fairly often (AS buys someone to weasel out of negotiating a contract because they can use the merger to force an arbitrated JCBA) and it always makes me wonder:

Exactly what impact does the cost of the pilot contract actually have on their bottom line, and is it significant enough to make management pursue a merger that they otherwise wouldn't pursue? My guess is that they wouldn't consider a merger (and all of the associated costs) that didn't offer growth, an edge on competition, or something like that, just to save a few bucks on delaying the pilot contract several years, but I'd love to know how that calculus actually looks. And of course this is the management that overpaid for VX by several billion dollars.

And just because people have been using Sun Country as the example, what does Alaska have to gain from them? ~45 airplanes, ~450 pilots, and a handful of gates in MSP? Frontier just bought almost 200 airplanes plus a hundred or so orders, 3000 pilots, and a nationwide route structure. AS buying Sun Country just seems like a huge waste of time.