The airline industry is one of the most highly regulated in the world, and thank god for that - it shouldn't be up to each airline to decide how often a plane gets a C check or how many hours your pilot can fly between breaks. Corporations prefer this too - when everyone is playing by the same rules you don't have to consider taking shortcuts to increase profits. You obviously can't regulate everything, but the government has an important role to play in guaranteeing the safety of the traveling public as well as consumer protections.

It is true that the current situation is not the airlines' fault. There are a lot of businesses that are going to suffer from this due to no fault of their own. A lot of those business owners will lose a lot of money or go out of business all together. Airlines are special, since they underpin so much of our economy - they can't be allowed to fail, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be pain for the shareholders and executives, just like much of America is suffering. Watershed moments like this pandemic are the perfect time to address long-standing complaints since the airlines are building themselves back up from square one anyway and as mentioned above, government dollars mean government influence. There's no overarching market philosophy that I can think of that can be both anti-regulation and pro-government support.