Presently Metrojet competes with Southwest out of two to five airports in the Northeast. Major airlines are not decentralized corporate empires, but tightly controlled, complex, labor intensive and potentially very dangerous machines designed to deliver millions of people and pieces of cargo safely at over 500 miles per hour over long distances. Air travelers lives are literally in the hands of the airlines. And a merged United will have about 175 million passengers per year or about 500,000 per day on domestic flights. United pilots who were not consulted on the merger, although they and other unions own most of the United stock are reportedly unhappy with proposed merger, which could force some of them out or limit their advancement based on the higher seniority of the average US Airways pilot.
Past history shows that large airline mergers are so difficult to accomplish smoothly.
Accordingly, a large financial and operational reserve should be set aside to prevent regional and even national disruption in the air transportation system. It should be recalled that the Allegheny Piedmont merger that created US Air nearly caused the airline to go bankrupt, and Peoples Express was done in by a too large acquisition. United has no experience in merging or acquiring another carrier that would nearly triple overnight its number of flights. The main antidote for reduced competition caused by mergers and industry concentration is to permit and encourage new entrants. The domestic airline industry is one of the only US industries that because of some Cold War era laws operates in a market sheltered from foreign competition.