This whole thing got hashed out on APC, so I won’t go into details, but it was a mix of an extremely misguided judge, an airline with buyers remorse, and the feds refusing to put their finger on the scale. To me, that merger was a slam dunk and in hindsight would have saved Spirit.

In the current administration, it would appear that big donors who show fealty get their mergers pushed through no matter the size of their empire. I think this would probably apply to Paul Singer, but Elliot is out of the picture, so I can’t imagine a scenario where any of the large airlines get a merger pushed through just because it would upset the four way balance of power that has largely existed for the last 15 years.