Southwest and Alaska are absolutely major carriers. Not the absolute largest perhaps but major. Alaska is certainly not discount, and despite the name is not particularly regional.

The Alaskan problem is they more often have unique routes. Which is great and serves cool stuff, but you can’t always count on it bringing competition to your main flight. Allegiant is similar.

If you're in the western half of the country, Alaska is essentially always a route for wherever you want to go, whether staying west or going east.

If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.

You don't have to go to the east coast to have trouble finding them. In St Louis they have a whole 4 flights, and 3 go to the west coast. So yes, absolutely regional. And that's the western side of the midwest. In comparison, Southwest has 55 direct destinations from the same airport. This isn't cherry picking: You have as sparse a route map from Dallas, yet another non trivial city. From there, Southwest has 70+ direct flights.

So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.

No, they aren’t. Alaska is slightly more of a major carrier than Southwest, but just barely. It’s the same as Jet Blue, except it has the American partnership for code sharing that helps it have an appearance of better coverage across the US. Yes, it carries more passengers, but that doesn’t put it in the same league as the three majors.

Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies (that it got from its Hawaiian acquisition) and does a few international routes on its own metal, but it is an airline you fly domestically and that primarily serves the west coast most effectively.

It’s not a bad airline (it’s also not anything special), but it’s not the equivalent of American, United, or Delta. And that isn’t to say the individual flying experience might not be the same as those carriers, but it’s not the same class of operation as a business. Again, it does a handful of international flights. To me, major means you have an array of wide-body jets and a large international operation. Not a few seasonal routes on its 29 wide-bodies. For comparison, American has a fleet of 137 wide body jets. Delta has 179. United has over 240.

These are not the same.

Southwest is even less of a major carrier. It’s got a lot of marketshare from its previous era focused on selling the idea that it was cheaper than the majors, but it operates one type of jet, has zero wide bodies and its international destinations don’t count.

And while Alaska might have to use American to pad out its network of flights at major hubs and markets, at least it can. Southwest’s design to eschew major hubs means that tou can’t get a lot of direct flights to major cities. If it happens to fly where you travel to, fine, but otherwise you have to look at at least one hop and go to a smaller airport than what you might expect.

> Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies

Jetblue doesn’t have widebody aircraft, but they still offer transatlantic connections.

Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.

> Which is actually worse

why?

given "Airline tickets were more expensive"

I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)

I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.

You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.

> I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off.

Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?

Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).

Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.

The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"

The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).

> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.

Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.

You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!

They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.

The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.

Economy Plus or whatever most carriers call it these days (aka domestic first class) is definitely not "first class" in any real comfort sense.

I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...

> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them

Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?

Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?

What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.