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?
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There is lots of regulation and state ownership recently and today.
An example is the US foreign ownership is limed to 25% of an airline.
There is a lot of regulation about who is allowed to fly to which country and usually, you can fly from the country where the airline is incorporated to another country but not between two other countries. So a UK airline can fly UK to US but not US to Mexico
Air France, Lufthansa, British Airways etc state owen in full into late 1980-1990. Emirates, Aeroflot, Turkish Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines, and a lot of others are examples of fully or partially government-owned.
You start to see airlines that operate in multiple countries in Europe because of EU regulations. It is Air France–KLM today so the French and Dutch former state airlines are merged. Lufthansa has airlines in multiple European countries too.
Ryan Air grew large after the 1997 deregulation of EU.
So operating airlines with subsidiaries globally is practically impossible because of regulation, and where you can operate multinational like in the EU large national airlines already exited
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