You’re using one data point, 2019, a pretty damn good year for the U.S. economy. I encourage you to look at the last 20 some years of U.S. airlines profits (emphasis on U.S. since those aren’t subsidized as much as national carriers like Emirates, Singapore, AirFrance...etc). Average profit margin is around 0.5% despite creating a ton of value for the US economy.

Publicly owned doesn’t mean non-profit, it means government ownership. There are plenty of public companies who post profits.

And even if we were to make airline public, wed just be reversing the trend over the last few decades. There is a reason why so many nationalized airline went private, the government kind sucks at running businesses (not always, but often).