Originally Posted by rickair7777

While it's a fairly obvious and potentially logical business move, some things have to happen first...

AS finishes up the HA meger, that's probably 3-5 years before they have bandwidth to go back to the M&A buffet.

HA merger needs to wind up being profitable, if they're losing money it's in their DNA to fix that, not double down and spend more money that they don't have on new toys.

Political/Judicial climate might need to be permissive. HA may have been a special case in that regard, with strong local political support from proper side of the aisle. I'm pretty certain that both Kanter and Kan wanted and fully intended to kill the AS/HA deal, but got shot down by the Party at the 11th hour due to election dynamics.

Also history and culture leads one to conclude that AS is interested only in acquisition, not sale or even a merger of equals. So that might be a factor depending on B6 managers.