Legacy carrier

In the United States, a legacy carrier is an airline that was once economically regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) during the period of airline regulation 1938–1978 or can trace its origin to one that did. The CAB was a now defunct federal agency that tightly controlled almost all US commercial air transport during that period. As related below, many features associated with the legacy airline business model were actually developed not during the regulated era, but instead in the first decade or so of the deregulated era, as legacy carriers adapted to an unfamiliar competitive environment.

While the term "legacy carrier" is most often used in a US context, it is possible to speak of legacy carriers elsewhere, since tight airline regulation was once the global norm and following US airline deregulation, many other countries went through some kind of airline deregulation. Non-US carriers with origins that precede liberalization can be viewed as legacy carriers. For instance, in Europe, flag carriers such as British Airways, Air France, KLM, Iberia, and Lufthansa, (with origins well before the liberalized era) can be viewed as legacy carriers in contrast to airlines such as Ryanair, EasyJet, Wizz Air, and so forth.

There are currently four surviving legacy carriers, with Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines having completing their merger on September 18, 2024:

Each of the above was founded by 1932 (93 years ago), although typically under a different name than they are currently known as.

Legacy carriers do not include:

Prior to 1979, the CAB regulated its carriers as a cartel, strictly limiting competition between them and setting uniform fare levels nationally. Such fare levels were above those that would prevail in a free market, as proven by comparison with fares charged by less-regulated intrastate carriers during the regulated era. CAB carriers thus entered deregulation with a legacy of high costs. The history of the legacy carriers following deregulation is in significant part the story of their struggle with this legacy, their efforts to cut costs and to compensate for such costs through various business model adaptations. One indication of this long-term struggle is that of the surviving US legacy carriers, all have gone through bankruptcy since 1978 with the exception of Alaska Airlines.

A complete list of CAB-regulated scheduled airlines in 1978, the last year of the regulated era, is available in the Civil Aeronautics Board article. Those are the legacy carriers as of the start of the deregulated era. For completeness, there is also a list of the charter carriers from the same year (known as "supplemental air carriers"). Whether the supplemental airlines count as legacy carriers is largely moot since they had little impact on the industry after deregulation.

Of the 1978 scheduled passenger CAB carriers, as shown in the table referenced above, 23 flew jets: