Unintended Consequences
If UAL does liquidate there will be unintended consequences that will affect the industry.
Has anyone thought of the regional jets that feed into UAL. If UAL is gone there nothing to feed into, a few passengers may fly, those who do not need a connection. I believe the current revenue stream for regional feeders is they are paid by the flight, not by the number of passengers onboard. Regionals may try to become point-to-point airlines, but they will miss the pay by flight and now have to get out and sell tickets to individuals, a real hard change to implement, with a lot of marketing and sales costs involved
Perhaps regionals can change their structure and develop useful point-to-point routes, even have agreements with other regionals to have a more complete route structure.
If UAL liquidates and the regionals cannot change fast enough then they to would end up following UAL’s footsteps.
It appears the airline that is going to survive needs a business model similar to Southwest and JetBlue. They use smaller aircraft of one model. I can see this will spell trouble for Boeing and possibly Airbus. Sales of B737 may hold up but the new airlines will not be needed B767, B747, B777 aircraft. Boeing could end up shutting down production lines for the larger aircraft. I’m sure there is more profit in a B747 sale than B737 sale. New aircraft sales could be depressed for years as there are many aircraft parked in the desert.
And off course this ripples down to the engine manufactures…