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ThunderSizzle

I'd argue there's only three "major" carriers: American, United, and Delta.

The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.

For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.

EDIT: It's really 4 equally large ones by passenger miles:

* 1 Delta Air Lines 17.8%

* 2 American Airlines 17.5%

* 3 Southwest Airlines 17.3%

* 4 United Airlines 16.0%

The rest are sub 10%

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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.

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.

To your edit, Alaska is something like 9.9%. Technically below 10%, but barely.

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.

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