It's about absolute control. Airline managers in the US, are, on the whole, have astonishingly bad leadership skills. They have come out of the schools of accounting and see everything in terms of dollars, not realizing that you need to LEAD a company, not drive it. The other part of that most executives in the US really don't care about the industry they're in, or the end result, but only how many tens of millions of dollars they can soak out of it as fast as possible. The traitors that drove the banking industry in the US off the cliff, while they pocketed literally hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation are proof of this. These guys are not incompetent. Far from it. They knew exactly what they were doing.