The inconvenient facts
1] Airlines are a cyclic industry. This will be the 4 th time the industry has cratered in my career.
2) The airlines have enjoyed unprecedented levels of profitability in the 2013 to 2019 time period
3) Prudent airline executives would have used some of the profit to build up a rainy day fund for the next downturn, instead they pissed it away to juice the stock price and therefore the exec bonuses, including borrowing money to buy back stock
4) The end result is the same old, same old...Capitalized profits, Socialized losses. Tax payers pay for the short term thinking and utter lack of vision of the entire airline senior management, all of whom will retire with 7 or 8 figure pay outs.