Months before United reached out to American Airlines to discuss a potential blockbuster merger, it made the same approach to Delta, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
Citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, the Journal said United CEO Scott Kirby contacted Delta CEO Ed Bastian last year to pitch a linkup between the two carriers. Delta’s leadership met and talked over the idea, but discussions with United ultimately did not advance, the newspaper reported.
It was not immediately clear why the discussions stalled, or how the two companies viewed their chances of getting such a large deal approved.
Neither United nor Delta has commented publicly on the story.
If accurate, the Journal’s report suggests that Kirby was, for a time, more serious about setting up an acquisition or merger with a competitor airline than was previously known.
Earlier this year, United made waves when it approached American about potentially joining operations. The deal would have brought together two of the country’s largest commercial airlines and given the combined company a market share of just over 34%, a level of dominance not seen by any U.S. carrier in years.
Bloomberg reported that Kirby presented the idea to American executives and to President Donald Trump, perhaps expecting the administration to provide some leeway for such a transformative agreement.
Analysts predicted that the U.S. Justice Department would still reject the tie-up as anticompetitive, citing regulators’ decisions on much smaller attempted mergers over the past several years.
The speculation prompted American to release a public statement distancing itself from the merger talks. It said it had no interest in combining with United, and was confident in its own plan to improve its profitability.
A United-Delta merger would have created an even larger entity, at least by some metrics. Based on figures from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the two airlines combined control almost 35% of domestic air travel.
United and Delta are also the two most profitable U.S.-based airlines.
Kirby said in June that he had backed away from the idea of a large-scale merger and suggested that “consolidation” was probably not in United’s near future.
