Would, would we have had a more functional airline industry, um, if, you know, if, if there had been a more favorable attitude toward mergers under Biden?

I mean, so, so first of all, Spirit, um, did not fail overall because of fuel, right? They were expected, widely expected to liquidate by the industry back in December before the price of fuel went up.

Spirit failed because of Spirit, a number of decisions that Spirit made, including, by the way, after the deal for JetBlue to acquire them, uh, was killed, uh, in the courts.

Uh, so for instance, Frontier offered more than once after that to buy them, and Spirit's board was not interested in the deal that was on the table.

According to Bill Franke, who's the chairman of Frontier, it was basically, you know, Spirit felt that they were not offering enough money, right? So they thought that they could be, you know, could work things out better on their own.

It wa- you know, th- rather than taking the deal, ultimately it would've been a better deal to sell.

It was a misjudgment.

Like, should, should I be caring about this as someone who's n- never gone on Spirit?

Members of Congress have also been able to, uh, exert pressure one way or the other to have convenient flights instituted to places that they happen to wanna go.

Well, so it's often not necessarily where they wanna go, but where their constituent airlines wanna fly, uh, or their constituents wanna fly.

And so there is what's called the perimeter rule out of National Airport, and it's currently set at 1,250 miles.

You can't fly more than 1,250 miles from that airport unless there is a exemption slot that has been granted in law and then distributed by the Department of Transportation.

And DOT is given the authority to decide what proposals by an airline are in the public interest.

And they have a number of criteria, and members of Congress will even write into the law as they're authorizing these, uh, ways of kind of steering, uh, where these are going to go.

So most recently, there were five new, quote, "beyond perimeter slots" that were authorized by that 2024 FAA reauthorization.

[laughs]