US Airways and American Airlines will merge and the announcement will be made early tomorrow morning.  Doug Parker will be CEO and Tom Horton will be non-executive chairman of the board.

We like that they are merging but we don’t like Tom Horton’s presence in this because even a non-executive chairman wields influence and is able to engage in second guessing a CEO.  Doug Parker will be doing things very differently in this airline and that’s liable to create opportunities to sow dissent.

This will create the world’s largest airline but it won’t be the world’s strongest.  There is a lot of work to be done to be that airline and Delta CEO Richard Anderson is unlikely to make it easy for anyone to topple his airline.

More updates later.

Filed under: Airline News, Mergers and Bankruptcy by ajax