American Airlines Legend Bob Crandall on How Mergers Led to Increased Inequality
Photo Credit: Bob Crandall at the Robert W. Baker Integrated Operations Center IOC in Fort Worth, Texas on October 25, 2017. Crandall is a longtime critic of airline consolidation. American Airlines Group / Brandon Wade
Skift Take
Bob Crandall called it in the late 1970s, saying airline deregulation would be the ruination of U.S. aviation. You can credit the retired American Airlines chairman and CEO with consistency as he argues that airline mergers — and mergers in general — have contributed to capital accumulation at the expense of workers, and the demise of small cities.
If I hadn't knowingly phoned Bob Crandall, the former American Airlines chairman and CEO, I might have almost thought I had mistakenly dialed former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders or democratic socialist congressional insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Not that Crandall, 82 and somewhat reluctantly dispatched from corporate board service because of his age, is a socialist or an insurgent, but his slant on airline deregulation and consolidation in recent years has a decidedly egalitarian bent.
Crandall, who opposed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, argues that deregulation greatly harmed the U.S. airline route network for consumers, and that the wave of airline consolidation over the past decade hurt competition, and contributed to widening the gap between the proverbial haves and have-nots.
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"At the time when we opposed it, when I opposed it, we took the view that it was likel
