Airplane manufacturing is a very tough process. Barring some strange point of divergence, it’s hard to avoid large airplane builders sorting out into a few giants. Yet airlines are another story altogether. It’s interesting how in the “Goldilocks businesses”, airplane builders and airlines fall on opposite disadvantageous ends.

For the manufacturers, it’s the “too many barriers to entry, thus you end up with a oligopoly” issue. For the airlines, where existing planes and even crews are just a few lease deals away, it’s the “too few barriers to entry, which leads to too many participants chasing too small a market”. In many cases both of these are unavoidable. (Novels, sadly, were the latter even before the rise of internet self-publishing).

What this means is that it’s incredibly easy to change the fates of the airlines, and even easier with a point of divergence after the large and successful deregulation of the late 1970s.