I mean, what do you expect happens after airlines die from a price war? It’s not lower prices.
Doing that just sets the stage for a monopoly to form, just add time. The price war should be won by the airline that can most efficiently manage resources and adapt different business models to provide stable service with fewer inputs. That is what the Market is purportedly for, no?
Consolidation is not good. High variety distributes society's eggs across many baskets, creating fault tolerance. Consolidation leaves us one black Swan away from a potentially unrecoverable calamity.
And then what? Is that not a monopoly? I know the classic response to this is newcomers will come up with lower prices, but what if there's economy of scale, and newcomers just can't compete?