At least Spirit has opportunities if none of this works out. Both sides of the aisle are coming to terms with the migrant problem all over the country. I’m betting Spirit is absorbed into the Federal government and is rebranded Deporter Airways. Spirit has experience dealing with tough ombré s. Doubtful JB could fulfill this role.

I mean....that is how most airline mergers work. Why would this have been any different?

The government here basically took the position to define different segments of a 121 aircarrier certificate.

This is probably a semantic argument, but Words Mean Things.

This was always going to be an acquisition, and it was never about two airlines getting married and celebrating their nuptials. Acquiring NK would allow an accelerated growth plan for B6 to more readily compete against the Big 4. This was a big part of the argument they made in court.

I keep seeing threads and insinuations that JetBlue was trying to do one thing and planning another; but that's not what was happening, nor what was disseminated to the employees of either airline. I don't know where this keeps coming from, but the plan to acquire NK for its assets was the plan.

Slash and burn? When you acquire the airplanes, the gates and the crews and the subsequent personnel to support the larger operation....what's left to slash or burn? I suppose there would be a lot of superfluous yellow marketing swag....

There wasn't a quiet part. There's just what it was. An acquisition.

JB made some public comments they probably shouldn’t have imo. I understand thier argument to compete against the big 4 needed to be crafted and coherent. I’m just not so sure they should have mentioned taking cheap seats out of the market. Keep that to yourself until after approval.
Completly different scenario but when swa made a run at f9 they made some public comments such as. We’re returning all the Airbus and laying off employees during the Great Recession. That bit them in front of a bankruptcy judge with the creditors (Airbus being one of them) as well as other interested parties. They learned from that and didn’t do any of those things shortly after when purchasing AirTran.

Poorly written analysis; did you notice the Altman Z score? B6 better than Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier. B6 Z score was positive, which means it has a better balance sheet than the others that scored lower. You really think Delta is at risk, he tries to address it in his article with revenue & niche markets, but very poor speculative analysis IMO. He doesn’t even get the facts right on the $470M. Almost all of that has already been paid to Spirit shareholders. Not worth the blogging paper it’s written on.

I noticed some of those mistakes as well.

Seeking Alpha is borderline click-bait. I pay little attention to what they say.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it's gone!

Pretty sure that articel was written with Chat GBT

Agreed. In the DL/NW merger everyone knew MEM would be shut down shortly after...but they didnt come out and say it to the world. A segment of the NW customer base was harmed, in that they lost airline service. Now of course if you ask DL in hindsight they can claim market conditions, economics, yada yada as the reasons it was closed. But again, we all knew beforehand.

With JB/NK we have JB coming out and saying right off the bat that we wont be able to serve a segment of the NK customer base. So "this one's for you" was born. If JB had played it cooler (and the NK CEO shut his freaking mouth) then maybe the public perception could have been that JB is going to adopt the best practices from the NK business model and integrate into JB, adding more ultra low fare seats and expanding service in overlapping markets. Or something to that effect. Then 2 yrs after the merger closes they cancel all that nonsense stating "market conditions have changed."