United’s CEO brought the merger idea to the White House but considered it last fall

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby raised the idea of ​​an airline merger with the Trump administration this year, according to people familiar with the matter, though he had been considering a potential airline deal since last fall.

Bloomberg News reported on Monday that Kirby had floated the idea of ​​linking up with… American Airlines To the White House in February. Some airline analysts and experts ignored the possibility of this merger, which would create the world’s largest airline, saying that the regulatory hurdles would be too great to overcome. United and American declined to comment on the report.

A combination of this scale has never been tried in the United States, although waves of industry consolidation that began about two decades ago have left America, the United States, and Latin America. Delta Airlines and Southwest Airlines It controls about 80% of the local market share.

But United’s Kirby said the next stage for U.S. airlines is to figure out how to better compete on the global stage.

“Volume will help” in competition for U.S.-bound flights, he told the Stratechery podcast in an episode that aired in January.

“We have customers who fly United almost all the time or fly Delta, but when they go to the Middle East, it’s fragmented enough that they fly Emirates,” he said. “If we are bigger and have more offerings for those customers, it will probably make more sense for them to fly with us when they go to the Middle East.”

US airlines have spent years complaining about what they describe as unfair government subsidies that some airlines in the Middle East receive. But US airlines have recently teamed up with some of these airlines: United now has a partnership with Emirates, American has a partnership with Qatar Airways, and Delta signed a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Airways in 2024.