Delta walked away when they thought regulators wouldn't allow a merger that big.

AS had a lot of cash on hand and the stock was relatively cheap. Management at Alaska was worried about being taken over.

[QUOTE=Beta82;2649546]I don’t even work for your airline and I can’t, for the life of me, comprehend why you care in the least about the terms JET vs. AIRPLANE. Who cares? I mean, really? Who cares? Plane, jet, whatever.

Were you a hall monitor in junior high?

[QUOTE=Beta82;2649546]“the jet” is a very common term at SWA too. I’m thinking it’s because it’s a jet...

It isn’t just grabbing at straws. The amount of MELs we are carrying are above and beyond from what we ever carried before. WiFi and pax comfort items are being left broken, in fact I have had a few 4 day trips where 50% of the airplanes have WiFi written up, and not just the sat wifi.

I’m not saying it’s a sign of being bought, to me it’s a sign of the Bus going away, but if there is an acquisition, we will look back at this and it will be obvious that something was going on in hind sight.

Taking down a bunch of planes at once to paint in any month seems silly. Postponing all aircraft painting for what, 6 months now, has put them on an even tighter schedule to get it done (don’t forget that there is a royalty fee and deadline to get this livery off the planes). Meanwhile 737s are going down every month to get decals applied and new paint jobs. I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all, but to me it clearly indicates something. What that something is, we won’t know until we see it on the news.

Yep, at this point it looks like they spent 4+ billion just to expand enough to try and not get bought but the stock price hasn’t recovered yet. And with the current administration allowing some huge merger/acquisitions, I don’t think Alaska is safe from being bought at all.

Yep, with the Sprint/T-Mobile anything is possible. But they would have to try to get it done soon as I don't see the current administration making it another 4 years.

Sprint/T-Mobile, AT&T/Time Warner are huge, unprecedented approved mergers. I wouldn’t even consider JB in the wheelhouse for purchasing AS. They can’t afford it and right now UAL is probably drooling at the idea of buying JB and not having to digest anything.

American and SWA could make a buy at AS and I bet the DOT wouldn’t bat an eye right now.

UA would have a big problem in the northeast. They made the excellent decision to give up JFK, which DL kindly exploited. There would have to be big concessions between JFK and EWR. BOS would also probably take a hit.

That’s exactly my point though. UAL was eyeing JB but would have previously had to divest too much to make it work. Imagine if they had a no restrictions green light to acquire JB because our administration is allowing it