No. You don't understand the reason previous FFP spinoffs have been done or proposed. In the US, they've been proposed by shareholders, who expected to get more value for their stock by the stock splitting between the airline and the spun-off FFP. If you don't understand the complexities of shareholder value (and perceived/forecast shareholder value), you can't understand why they wanted the FFP spun off. (Btw, these same shareholders at other times demanded that American spin off American Eagle, their regional jet division, for the same kinds of reasons. These large shareholders don't care about what an FFP is, they just look at the profits of an individual division of an airline and want it to become a separate company, that's all.)

There've been lots of FFPs spun off worldwide (even if perhaps only one in North America), and none of them have been spun off only to be sold to a completely different type of company (such as a bank).

And, btw, there are no credit card companies! What you seem to be thinking of as credit card companies are simply small divisions of huge banking conglomerates (in the UA case, it's not "Chase", it's JP Morgan Chase). You know, those "too big to fail" banks after they merged commercial banking and investment banking together. (And credit cards are just a fraction of the commercial banking side.)

(Ok, so some credit cards are issued by smaller banks which are not part of huge banking conglomerates. But UA's credit cards are issued by a subdivision of JP Morgan Chase, and AA's credit cards are issued by a subdivision of Citigroup, and both are among the biggest of the "too big to fail" banking conglomerates.)