American Airlines is poised to win back three gates at Chicago O’Hare, undercutting United’s effort to use aggressive growth and gate reallocations to widen its advantage at the airport. If the preliminary determination holds and the FAA’s flight caps stay in place, Scott Kirby’s strategy to squeeze American further out of Chicago will have failed.
News and notes from around the interweb: A single temperature sensor at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport was being used for Polymarket bets on Paris temperatures so someone stuck a hair dryer next to it and made $34,000 this month. Charges have been filed. polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter – basically unguarded – the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like “22°C” when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it’d hit – then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max This makes plenty of sense to me: Tim Cook’s compensation was about $75 million in each…
Spirit Airlines told a bankruptcy judge it could run out of usable cash next week, even after carving out restricted funds for payroll, taxes, and creditor-controlled accounts. Spirit is not presenting a real path back to profitability — it is asking the court to help it survive long enough for a legally dubious government bailout to arrive (which it may quickly burn through).
Flight attendants union head Sara Nelson is now urging President Trump to throw Spirit Airlines a lifeline, a remarkable turn for one of organized labor’s most prominent progressive voices. Her appeal doubles as an argument that the Biden administration’s antitrust decision helped push Spirit to the brink, even as the bailout now being discussed appears to have no real basis in law.
President Trump had not yet decided whether to rescue Spirit Airlines when two of his cabinet secretaries argued the case in front of him, with one side pitching a bailout as a midterm political win and the other warning it would look like a costly rescue of a failing company. The striking part is not just that the White House is weighing a $500 million loan and a potential 90% ownership stake, but that there is still no plausible legal authority for the federal government to do it.
Airport documents show Delta has quietly leased lounge space in Honolulu, joining Southwest and Alaska in a growing wave of airline lounge development at the airport. That means Honolulu is no longer just getting one new premium space — it now appears set for three separate airline lounges, a much bigger shift in the airport’s passenger experience than publicly seen before.
American Airlines is starting to improve in ways that finally show up in the numbers, with customer satisfaction rising faster than at any other major U.S. airline even as the carrier posted another quarterly loss. That is real progress, but the earnings call also made clear how much is still broken — from fleet and seat mix to customer service, coastal relevance, and the lack of a fully realized strategy employees can actually execute.
American Airlines is not just grading flight attendants on customer experience and operational metrics — it is also tying their scores to credit card approvals. That matters because the airline’s most profitable business is selling miles to Citibank, which means inflight card pitches are no longer just a side hustle for crew but part of how performance itself gets measured.
Spirit Airlines is now days away from liquidation, but its collapse did not come out of nowhere. The airline lost the cost advantage that once made it a success, kept selling a product customers increasingly did not want, and then watched bigger rivals learn how to match its fares while offering a better experience.
American Airlines explored a merger with Alaska, and while those talks reportedly did not advance, the two carriers are now working on a revenue-sharing deal that could deepen an already unusually close partnership. That matters because American badly needs stronger relevance on the West Coast, while Alaska gains more global reach and loyalty value by tying itself more tightly to a larger international network.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
