National flag airlines have been rapidly going out of business and will continue to do so. For their part, U.S. carriers face the difficulty of convincing other nations that sovereignty is no longer important and that globally owned corporations offer the best chance for continued strength in the airline industry. The present challenge is to bring other individual European nations and, ultimately, the entire European Union into the economic fold. Once North America and Europe can agree to relax ownership barriers, agreements with each nation could be negotiated, removing barriers to ownership and entry, and making the way clear for the industry to consolidate globally. Given the importance of the U.S. and European markets, there will likely be few national holdouts from such an aviation regime.
Consolidation requires capital, of course.
On a worldwide basis, the airline industry also desperately needs capital for privatization and investment. With a few exceptions, the only airlines having such capital resources today are U.S.-owned. There is an excellent opportunity here to use the financial strength of the American carriers to guarantee that the United States has a guiding voice in the direction of the industry as a whole. Of course, it is to be expected that the shifts in ownership being discussed here are likely to worry organized labor, even though such concerns have no ground in reality. Flights within each nation would still have to be operated by home-country nationals, just as the auto plant in Thailand uses Thai workers instead of American or Japanese.