Correct. There's precedent - when the (railroads) SP and DRG&W merged, the latter was the "winning" party in the merger but the former was the name selected because it had broader name recognition.

The biggest issue with the mergers has been that more than a few of them were driven by weakness (sometimes even bankruptcy) on the part of at least one of the carriers. TWA went through three bankruptcies (one admittedly imposed upon it by Carl Icahn - I have to wonder if TWA or the shareholders might not have been able to either sue Icahn for self-dealing/breaching his fiduciary duty to TWA [by arranging a punitive deal to a company he controlled on the way out the door] or force a breach and make Icahn sue - from what I see about the deal it's not clear what TWA got in exchange for that ugly deal) while US Airways was in bankruptcy at the time of the merger with America West. I think every extant mainline US airline except WN went through bankruptcy in the early 2000s.

So at that time, I think there was a strong case to be had that there were, at one point, too many carriers (as well as some bad legacy deals in place). What was probably needed some 20 years ago (I'd say after 9/11, given the induced chaos there) was some sort of government-mediated restructuring of all of the old labor deals in exchange for constraints on subsequent mergers.

The other thing that probably would help (and not just here) would be restrictions on saddling corporations with the debt from leveraged buyouts (either outright or, in the case of a bankruptcy within X years of the takeover, forcing the entity that executed the buyout to take a murderous haircut and imposing restrictions on them reselling that debt). TWA was a victim of corporate bad behavior.

I will say that I think we missed the best opportunity to at least get a fifth "major" carrier a few years back when AS got VX instead of B6 because of the relevant route networks (B6 being East Coast-based vs VX being West Coast-based, as well as probably more compatible models/philosophies)...though I also recall thinking at the time that a three-way tie-up between the three of them probably made at least some sense in terms of scale.

In the end, I think this is a case of the pendulum swinging too far to one side after having been too far on the other side. Pre-ADA airlines were too hamstrung in what they could do (functionally not having any ability to vary fares and routes; the CAB was excessively ossified). Now, there's a case that they're far too able to change T&Cs at a whim and generally behave dubiously (e.g. publishing schedules they have trouble keeping and carrying out "blue sky" cancellations) due to an overly-constrained marketplace. At a minimum, we probably need a law saying "Okay, you're revenue-based on your FFPs - fine, but now you need permission to overhaul the programs", especially since the FFPs have essentially become credit card programs. Another option would be to partially re-regulate carriers with more than X% of the marketplace (I'm thinking 10% or 15% - the gap between UA (144m/about 16-17%) and AS (41m/about 4-5%) is so massive that either threshold has the same effect.

(I'm somewhat in favor of the proposed B6-NK merger, but more because I think we do need another 1-2 "major" carriers to pressure the "big three"/"big four" than a desire to see "more consolidation". B6's network isn't anywhere near broad enough to actually compete in a lot of places, and their lack of equipment both constrains frequencies and results in chronic OTP issues [I don't think I've [i]ever had an on-time trip with them outside of the Mint network].)