Butch Stewart realized the poor airline experience was ruining the first and last impression of a Sandals vacation. He bought Air Jamaica, vertically integrating the travel process. The airline wasn't a profit center but a 'flying billboard' to ensure a seamless, high-quality experience from airport to resort.

Beta Technologies isn't just selling electric airplanes; it's building a network of proprietary "charge cubes" at airports. This strategy, reminiscent of Tesla's Superchargers, creates a competitive moat and ensures viability for its own aircraft. It also establishes a new revenue stream, making money even if a competitor sells the plane.

Despite attractive growth, new airlines struggle to enter the Mexican market due to the incumbents' scale. Volaris and Viva, controlling a large portion of domestic capacity, can strategically add flights and slash prices on any route a new entrant attempts to serve. This pricing power ensures any startup would be driven to bankruptcy within months.

Classifying acquisition targets into three tiers—Hubs (new regions with strong management), Spokes (smaller tuck-ins), and Route Buys (customer lists)—creates a disciplined strategy. This ensures each acquisition serves a specific, pre-defined purpose in the overall consolidation and has a corresponding deal structure.

GE serves two distinct customers: powerful airframers for the initial sale and a fragmented base of hundreds of airlines for aftermarket services. This split forces new entrants to solve a '3D puzzle' of satisfying both technically demanding OEMs and a global user base simultaneously, creating an immense and durable barrier to entry.

Volaris and Viva can likely win regulatory approval for their merger by offering a political quid pro quo. By shifting capacity to the former president's underutilized, military-run Felipe Ángeles airport (AIFA), they allow the government to declare its controversial infrastructure project a success, creating a powerful non-economic incentive for approval.

Beyond low fares, Ryanair's long-term dominance stems from its financial strategy of investing when the industry is weak. The airline uses its large cash reserves to place massive, discounted aircraft orders with manufacturers like Boeing during slumps and opportunistically seizes market share when legacy carriers falter. This turns competitors' crises into major growth opportunities.

The primary growth driver for Mexican airlines like Volaris is not taking share from rivals, but converting travelers from the country's massive long-range bus industry. With 3 billion annual bus passengers, airlines tap a huge, underpenetrated market by offering a superior value proposition on a dollar-per-hour basis, fueling structural demand growth.

Amadeus was formed by major airlines to create a neutral distribution system. This origin story provided immediate scale, credibility, and deep industry integration, creating a powerful competitive moat from day one that would be nearly impossible for a startup to replicate.