Everything is relative. As I recall, nearly all the managements were doing stock buybacks.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/041702.asp

With the fed lending money at ridiculously low prices it likely seemed like a great alternative to holding cash or even buying aircraft with cash. The stockholders are - after all - the actual owners of the business and they want income on their investment too. People tend to forget that. And when the fed is loaning money at less than the rate of inflation, it’s generally a win-win to finance rather than pay cash. But the fed has changed policies and they are driving up interest intentionally, faster than AA can pay down that debt, so eventually these low interest bonds will need to be refinanced at the higher rates, causing an even greater cash drain. For AA the timing turned out to be bad. If the pandemic had never happened and earnings had just continued it would be far less of a problem.

The problem was they did the buybacks when the stock was riding high only to have to sell stock when it was tanking because of the pandemic. Which is kind of how most people who lose money in the stock market lose money in the stock market. Now investors know that they’ll have to wait a long time to see any return on their investment so that keeps the stock price low.

Now the problem is stock dilution. When the measure of merit is earnings per share and you have a lot of shares of stock out there it takes a lot of earnings to get your earnings per share up to something attractive. That will make it difficult to raise money at reasonable rates for years in the future, which is why most airlines bonds are junk rated right now.