I'm not an expert on this subject so I'd like to understand it better. My understanding is that during the airline bankruptcies of the mid-2000's, courts decided that airlines could terminate their pension plans and hand them over to the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Since the PBGC only guaranteed pensions up to a certain amount, many pilots at bankrupt carriers lost a substantial amount of their pension. Largely in response to what happened to employees' pensions following bankruptcies in the airline and steel industries, in 2006 Congress passed the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA) which was intended, among other things, to minimize the danger posed to employees' pensions by bankrupt employers with underfunded pension funds. I don't know how successful the PPA has been in minimizing that danger.

Serious question, after the PPA, how much danger is there now vs before the PPA in employees losing much of their pensions if the pension ends up being administered by the PBGC? One thing I found that concerns me comes from this study by the PBGC in 2008, after the PPA was enacted, that said, "Recent changes in law will likely result in somewhat larger benefit reductions for some participants whose plans terminate while their employers are in bankruptcy proceedings." That doesn't make sense to me if the PPA was designed by Congress to accomplish the opposite of that. Again, I'm nowhere near an expert on this subject and am trying to understand it better. I'd appreciate any insight you can offer.