The US industry’s cartel kingpins have their boundaries and don’t want to step hard on the toes of the other cartel kingpins, as peace within the oligopoly is more profitable than open warfare amongst the oligopoly’s kingpins. And so AA is more or less signaling to DL that JFK is going to be DL’s first by far and away (when it comes to dividing up the market amongst the US3 airlines); and as EWR will of course remain UA’s, AA seems to be slowly but surely retreating from NYC.

It will be interesting to see how these cartel kingpins deal with parceling LAX over the longer term.