The skies for American Airlines are clearer than you think

Dramatic headlines across business publications declare that there is a “civil war” within American Airlines, with union leaders expressing a lack of confidence in the CEO, Robert Isom. Pundits are piling on, with the groupthink of armchair analysts reflexively comparing American’s stock chart to admittedly impressive peers such as Delta and United, without recognizing their differences as compared to American, which flies the world’s largest number of passengers by far.

As Germany’s revered Konrad Adenauer once said, “We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”

Indeed, the recent misleading media narrative completely misses the strategic context. The real facts are that Robert Isom is leading American to new heights despite the potshots of misinformed critics and those with their own motivations. Isom’s leadership is a remarkable model of resilience on all dimensions. 

Of course, it is impossible to diminish the excellence of Delta and United’s leadership – on all dimensions.  There are no better CEOs in the nation than in the airline industry – in operational, financial, strategic domains and their individual characters are sterling. But a superficial comparison between Delta, United, and American across certain headline metrics can be deceiving. 

Let’s start with the number everyone loves to cite: American earned $111 million in 2025, while Delta generated $5 billion and United $3.4 billion in pure profits – with United and Delta’s stock outperforming American’s over the last few years. Case closed, right? Not remotely, and for several reasons. 

First, of note, American has not produced an annual loss during Isom’s time as CEO. Not even during his first year on the job in 2022, when the pandemic was still having a dramatic impact on the industry and American lost nearly $2 billion in the first quarter of the year. As it relates to 2025, the superficial comparison to peers ignores the most important structural reality in the airline industry today: United currently enjoys a $1 billion-plus annual cost advantage over American because its non-pilot labor groups — flight attendants, mechanics, fleet service workers, and customer service employees — are operating under contracts that dramatically lag market rates. American has contracts in place with all of those groups and its flight attendants are paid roughly 35% more than United’s. Pilots are at parity with identical profit-sharing provisions. When United’s contracts inevitably reset to market — and they will — a massive portion of that margin gap will evaporate overnight.

In other words, Isom has chosen to invest in his people. American has more than 130,000 employees, some 87% of whom are unionized, which is nearly 15x the private sector average for unionized workers in the United States. American has more unionized employees than any airline in the world. Isom paid them fairly, ahead of the........

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