Originally Posted by dera

You could buy a few large airlines with the amount they are upside down.

This is the part people don't seem to understand. AA is rolling in crazy amounts of debt and liabilities, and they have to spend a crap ton of that "liquidity" on the capex coming up on the plane deliveries. Meanwhile they are very short staffed so they can't really capitalize on the growth those new airframes would allow.
When those deliveries come, their shareholder equity will go down, not up, because the liquidity they carry will be converted into airplanes, that start to depreciate from day 1.

I don't think people understand how far AA has to climb before they are even technically solvent.
The good thing for pilots is that there isn't much fat to cut from the AA contract, DL and UA have the ability to pay so much more and they need the pilots, so I doubt any AA mainline pilot will really feel anything if they go through Ch11.