CONSOLIDATION has long been a topic in the airline industry — ever since deregulation kicked off 45 years ago. In the domestic USA, consolidation may have finally taken place in the 2010s following the (mainly) organic growth of LCC archetype Southwest and a spate of large mergers of the large network carriers (each of which had been through Chapter 11 restructuring at least once). The last of these was American and US Airways (itself a result of a 2005 merger with America West) in 2015.
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