There are global players in many industries and to get to be global often they acquire large national companies in countries to expand to those markets.
Why is it with Airlines that there are no global companies owning airlines across multiple nations?
Virgin is the closest I can think of and even they do not actually own the airlines, just the name in some places (Australia).
My only thought is that airlines are not exactly huge profit centres?
In: 201
It’s illegal.
Lots of the other comments here are true but they’re not the fundamental reason.
Unlike virtually all other industries, aviation *already* wrote up international treaties to cover international activity for most of the globe, long before basically anyone else except shipping, because aviation is inherently international. It’s called the Chicago Convention. It lays out, among other things, the “five freedoms of the air”.
We don’t need to get into the weeds here unless you want to, but those freedoms basically tie where you can pick and up drop off passengers to the country the airline is registered in. With extremely few exceptions, at least one of where you pick up or drop off has to be in your “home” country. That prevents a single airline from being global.
You can try to end run this by having a holding company own a local airline in each country. Enter ownership laws…most countries require that an airline be majority owned by people in the country. So you can’t get a majority holding company either.
The “freedoms of flight” generally don’t apply to cargo…which is why we have global air freight companies.
Edit:typo
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