Say out loud that air travel has gotten worse, that the fees are a shakedown, or that the people doing the work deserve a bigger cut, and somebody will inform you that you’re against capitalism. Maybe even that you’re unpatriotic. That accusation is pointed at exactly the wrong people, and this piece is about proving it.
Working Americans didn’t walk away from the deal. The deal most of us were sold ran on rules: fair competition, honest prices, consequences for cheating. Over the last forty-plus years, executives and their lobbyists paid to rewrite those rules. Conduct that used to risk a market-manipulation charge became standard practice. Protections headed for passengers and workers never arrived, because the industry sued them dead or lobbied them off the books first. That isn’t the system anybody signed up for. It’s the system being converted into something older and uglier, where a small group owns the rules along with everything else. There’s a word for where that road ends, and the word is oligarchy.
So no, the complaint isn’t capitalism. The complaint is the scheme. And one thing to hold onto as we go: the crews working your flights aren’t on the industry’s side of this story. They’re on yours. The evidence for that is coming.
Four rule changes. Who paid for each one. What each one cost you.
Rule change one: buybacks
Start with the big one, because everything else flows from it.
Before 1982, a company buying back its own stock on the open market ran a real risk of getting charged with market manipulation under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Think about why. Buying your own shares props up your own price. Regulators treated that with suspicion, so companies mostly didn’t do it. Profits went to dividends or back into the business instead.
Then the SEC adopted Rule 10b-18. That rule created a safe harbor: follow certain conditions on timing, price, and volume, and you’re immune from manipulation liability when you repurchase your own shares. Companies noticed. The Congressional Research Service points to one study finding buyback volume tripled within a year.
And nobody noticed harder than the airlines. Bloomberg ran the numbers: the biggest U.S. carriers spent 96 percent of their free cash flow from 2010 through 2019, about $45 billion, buying their own stock. American Airlines led the pack with more than $12.5 billion in repurchases while running negative cumulative free cash flow for the decade. Sit with that combination for a second. Negative free cash flow, plus billions in buybacks, means American was effectively borrowing money to buy its own stock.
While all this was going on, then-CEO Doug Parker announced in September 2017 that American was never going to lose money again. Forbes, citing financial writer Ben Hunt, reported that Parker sold more than $150 million of his own American shares between 2014 and 2019. So the company buys, the price goes up, the CEO sells. Under the rules as rewritten, every bit of that was legal.
Now, fairness requires the counterargument. The Motley Fool pushed back on the 96 percent figure, arguing free cash flow is a narrow measure and American was the outlier dragging up the average, while most carriers were reinvesting plenty in their operations. Fair enough. American was the outlier. American is also the airline whose product you’ve been sitting in.
You know what happened next. In 2020 the industry that spent the decade’s spare cash on its own shares asked Washington for help, and got more than $50 billion in federal aid, with a condition attached: no buybacks, no dividends. Those restrictions lapsed in September 2022, and the clock started ticking. Southwest authorized a $2.5 billion buyback in September 2024, mostly to fend off activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management. United announced a $1.5 billion program a few weeks later, its first since before the pandemic. And it isn’t just the majors. SkyWest, the regional giant flying for United, Delta, American, and Alaska, was back repurchasing shares by early 2023 and has stacked three separate $250 million buyback authorizations since, the most recent approved in July 2026. We are officially back where we started.
Rule change two: consumer protections
The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act gets blamed for everything, and the record is genuinely mixed. Average fares fell, routes multiplied, and people who could never afford to fly started flying. Noted. But the fare chart is not the story here.
The story is what happened to the consumer-protection authority the government kept for itself. Watch how fast the industry killed two recent rules.
In April 2024, the Department of Transportation finalized a rule requiring airlines to show you baggage, change, and cancellation fees up front, when you’re actually buying the ticket. Airlines and their trade association sued. The Fifth Circuit set the rule aside, and in 2026 DOT issued a new rule formally implementing that vacatur. What you get instead is a notice that fees may apply, plus a link to go hunting for them. Progress.
Article: Airline Lobby Kills Traveler Protections
Then there’s the one that hurts more. In December 2024, DOT opened a rulemaking that would have required airlines to pay you cash, $200 to $775 depending on the disruption, plus rebooking, meals, and lodging, when a delay or cancellation was the airline’s own fault. If that sounds exotic, it isn’t. The European Union and Canada already do it. Airlines and their trade group filed comments unanimously opposing it, arguing the costs would land on ticket prices. On November 17, 2025, DOT formally withdrew the proposal. And in December 2025 the department paused enforcement of the piece of its refund rule that treats a renumbered flight as a canceled one.
A coalition of 15 Democratic senators is now pushing legislation to reinstate the compensation requirements, per Reuters. Which tells you exactly where that protection lives today: not in a rule, but in a bill that has to survive the same lobbying that killed the rule.
Rule change three: labor law
Here’s something most travelers don’t know. Airline workers don’t organize under the same law as nearly everyone else in America. They fall under the Railway Labor Act, a 1926 statute with its own peculiar math.
How peculiar? To get a union election, workers need a majority of the entire work group, not just those who vote, to sign authorization cards within one year. The cards expire. The election runs through a federal agency called the National Mediation Board. And even after workers win a union and a contract, they can’t legally strike until the government releases them to. The system was designed to keep planes and trains moving, which sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, it hands an airline that wants to slow-walk its workers a lot of federal machinery to hide behind.
You can watch this playing out right now at Delta. Delta’s flight attendants are the only mainline flight attendant group in the country without a union contract, and they’re organizing to change that, building their union with AFA-CWA across a work group roughly 28,000 strong. Remember the math from above: that means winning a majority, one signed card at a time, and by the campaign’s own account the momentum is building. Delta’s pilots have been union since 1934. Its dispatchers are union. The flight attendants are getting the full corporate treatment instead: in June 2026, 172 members of Congress signed a letter from the Congressional Labor Caucus calling out what they described as Delta’s retaliatory actions against organizing workers and urging the company to adopt a neutrality agreement.
The PRO Act, reintroduced in Congress in 2025, would raise penalties on employers who interfere with union elections. It hasn’t passed. The rules, as currently written, still favor the side with the anti-union website budget.
And Delta is the headline fight, not the only one. SkyWest has spent decades keeping unions off its property, and the record is public. In 2007, pilots organizing with ALPA sued and won a federal court order requiring SkyWest to stop interfering with their campaign; the pilots alleged the company had banned union pins and stripped ALPA literature from crew areas, and the court’s own account of the case noted SkyWest expressed its opposition to unions through a “Union Free Statement” in the handbook given to every new hire, while fully funding an in-house pilots’ association.
Article: Flight Attendants vs Union Busting Industry – Delta and SkyWest Exposed
Nearly twenty years later, the same fight is running on two fronts at once. More than 5,000 SkyWest flight attendants are organizing to join AFA; AFA sued the company in October 2023, alleging it funds and controls the in-house SkyWest Inflight Association in violation of labor law, and the U.S. Department of Labor has separately sued the association. SkyWest’s pilots have an active ALPA campaign of their own, and in early 2026 the company sued two of its own pilots over employee data access, conduct the pilots’ attorney says was union organizing activity protected under the Railway Labor Act. SkyWest and the in-house associations dispute the claims, and the litigation is ongoing. While all of it plays out, the buyback authorizations from earlier in this piece have kept stacking up. A company’s priorities are a budget question, and this budget is public.
If you’re wondering why any of this should matter to somebody who just wants to land in Cleveland on time, the next section is the answer.
Rule change four: oversight
If you want to see what deferred investment actually buys, there’s no better case study than Southwest in December 2022.
Winter Storm Elliott hit every airline. The others recovered in a day or two. Southwest canceled roughly 17,000 flights over 11 days and stranded more than two million people, because its crew-scheduling software got overwhelmed and had to be bypassed while schedulers rebuilt the airline by hand. This wasn’t a surprise to the people who worked there. Southwest’s own unions, pilots and flight attendants both, had spent years blaming the carrier’s antiquated scheduling technology. Pause on that. The people warning loudest about the thing that would eventually wreck two million Christmases were the workers. Not the regulators, not the analysts. The crews. And this was the airline that, per Bloomberg’s data, had put roughly 70 percent of its free cash flow into buybacks in the decade before the pandemic. The money existed. It just went somewhere else.
DOT responded with a $140 million penalty in December 2023, the largest consumer-protection fine in the agency’s history, on top of more than $600 million in refunds and reimbursements. For a moment, that looked like oversight with teeth.
Then, in December 2025, DOT waived the final $11 million payment, crediting Southwest’s investment of $112.4 million in its network operations control systems. Read that sequence again slowly. DOT shrank the penalty for neglecting operational technology because Southwest finally bought the operational technology. The fine turned into a rebate for doing the thing the fine was for not doing.
The part where we follow the money
None of these rewrites fell from the sky, and you don’t have to take my word for it, because the receipts are public.
NOTUS, citing OpenSecrets data, reported that the airline industry spent $16.4 million on federal lobbying in just the first six months of 2025, with Airlines for America, Delta, United, Southwest, and American accounting for more than $12.2 million of it. Carriers hired firms tied to the current administration, including BGR Group, where Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy used to work. And when DOT withdrew the passenger compensation rule, the stated explanation ran one line: the withdrawal was consistent with department and administration priorities.
That’s the whole mechanism in one paragraph. Money goes in. Rules come out. Nobody had to break a law. The laws are the product.
Why it matters
Every one of these rewrites lands on the same people, and I’d bet you’re one of them.
Buybacks divert profit that could have gone to reserves, systems, and the profit-sharing checks workers actually see. Vacated fee rules mean you learn what the ticket really costs after you’ve committed to buying it. A weakened labor law means the workers who kept showing up through every meltdown have the least leverage to fix what causes the next one. And an oversight agency that waives penalties and withdraws rules is an agency the industry has already priced in.
Notice the pattern running through all four sections, because it’s the point of this piece. Every time workers had a voice, passengers were better off. The crews sounding alarms about Southwest’s software were trying to prevent your canceled holiday. The flight attendants organizing at Delta and SkyWest are fighting to join AFA, the union that calls flight attendants “aviation’s first responders,” the ones trained to get you out of a burning airplane. Airline workers are the traveling public’s advocates on the inside. That’s not sentiment, that’s the record, and it’s exactly why weakening their leverage was worth so much money to somebody.
The point isn’t that markets failed. Markets did exactly what the rules told them to do. The rules are what changed. Which is oddly good news, because rules can change back.
And that’s why the anti-capitalist accusation deserves to be returned to sender. Wanting fair competition, honest prices, and consequences for cheating isn’t an attack on the system. It’s what working people were promised the system was. The ones who actually abandoned capitalism are the ones who bought themselves a private copy of it.
What you can do
The rules changed once because organized money showed up consistently. They change back the same way, with organized people. And on this one, crews and passengers are the same team. A few places to start.
Flight attendants at both Delta and SkyWest are building their unions with AFA, and both campaigns welcome passenger supporters: deltaafa.org for Delta, ooitstime.com for SkyWest. If you know somebody who works at either airline, those links are worth passing along.
On the legislative side, there are two live items. Senators have introduced the Flight Delay and Cancellation Compensation Act, which would restore and harden the compensation rule DOT withdrew, setting a floor of at least $300 for delays over three hours and $600 for delays over six. And the PRO Act, which would raise penalties for interfering in union elections, is sitting in Congress. A call or letter to your own senators and representative, politely, firmly, and in writing, is exactly the input those records get built from.
The traveling public also has its own organized advocate in this fight. FlyersRights, the largest airline passenger organization, exists because its founder Kate Hanni spent more than nine hours trapped on a tarmac in 2006; the group helped push the tarmac delay rule into existence in 2009 and has endorsed the compensation bill above. Passengers built that organization the same way workers build unions, and it’s worth knowing and following.
On the paper trail: when DOT proposes a rule, the public comment period is open to you, not just to the trade association, at regulations.gov. DOT also takes air travel consumer complaints directly through its aviation consumer protection office, and complaint records are part of how the department tracks carrier conduct. And OpenSecrets publishes the industry’s lobbying numbers for free, so everything in the money section above is checkable by anyone with a browser.
The industry reads the rulebook very carefully. Worth returning the favor.
Disclosure: Aluminum Lady’s publisher has publicly supported the flight attendant organizing campaign at SkyWest and is named in ongoing litigation between AFA-CWA and the SkyWest Inflight Association. This article relies entirely on the public reporting, public court records, and public filings listed below.
Sources
- Congressional Research Service, “Stock Buybacks: Background and Reform Proposals,” updated 2019
- Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, “Disclosures and Share Repurchase: Did SEC Rules Curb Opportunistic Buybacks?,” April 9, 2025
- Bloomberg, Brandon Kochkodin, “U.S. Airlines Spent 96% of Free Cash Flow on Buybacks,” March 16, 2020
- Fast Company, “The airlines want a coronavirus bailout. Should they get it?,” April 2020
- Forbes, Jack Kelly, “After Mismanaging Their Companies With Stock Buybacks And Lucrative CEO Pay Packages, Airlines Demand Another $25 Billion From Taxpayers,” October 12, 2020
- Chief Executive, “American Airlines Will Never Lose Money Again, Says CEO Doug Parker”
- The Motley Fool, “Did American Airlines Really Waste All of Its Cash Flow on Buybacks?,” March 25, 2020
- CNBC, Leslie Josephs, “United shares hit pre-pandemic high after airline forecasts strong finish to 2024, plans buyback,” October 15, 2024
- UPI, “Southwest Airlines authorizes $2.5 billion stock buyback, announces changes for customers,” September 26, 2024
- Zacks via Yahoo Finance, “Are Airline Stocks Becoming More Shareholder Friendly?,” June 2023
- U.S. Department of Transportation, Aviation Consumer Protection, “Latest News” (final rule implementing Fifth Circuit vacatur of ancillary fee disclosure rule)
- Eckert Seamans Aviation Blog, “DOT Withdraws Proposed ‘Airline Passenger Rights’ Rulemaking,” November 2025
- Fodor’s, “DOT Withdraws Rule Requiring Airlines to Pay Cash Compensation for Flight Delays,” November 17, 2025
- Aerospace Global News, “DOT says airlines don’t owe a refund for flight number changes,” December 5, 2025
- Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, Delta AFA campaign, “Union 101” and campaign updates including the June 26, 2026 Congressional Labor Caucus letter
- CNN Business, “Southwest hit by record $140 million fine for holiday service meltdown in 2022,” December 18, 2023
- Airways Magazine, “DOT Waives Final US$11M Penalty of Southwest 2022 Meltdown,” December 2025
- NOTUS, “Airlines Are Winning in Trump’s Second Term,” September 16, 2025
- OpenSecrets, Airlines for America lobbying profile
- Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, “Organizing at Delta/SkyWest”
- Paddle Your Own Kanoo, “Largest Flight Attendant Union In The U.S. Faces Computer Fraud Allegations In Ongoing SkyWest Unionization Lawsuit,” December 12, 2025
- SkyWest, Inc., Form 8-K, $250 million share repurchase increase, May 6, 2025 (SEC EDGAR)
- TipRanks, “SkyWest Q2 Results and Expanded Share Buyback Program,” July 2026
- Deseret News, “SkyWest slapped over unions,” May 24, 2007
- U.S. District Court, N.D. California, SkyWest Pilots ALPA Organizing Committee v. SkyWest Airlines, order of June 27, 2007 (via GovInfo)
- Live and Let’s Fly, “‘Hacking’ Or Union Organizing? Airline Sues Two Pilots Over Employee Data Access,” February 2026
- Office of Senator Ed Markey, “Markey, Kelly, Blumenthal Introduce Legislation to Protect Airline Passengers from Flight Cancellations and Delays,” December 4, 2025
- U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “New airline passenger rights explained, with effective dates,” May 2026
