If American de-emphasized its presence there it would leave room for smaller players, such as Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways and Spirit, to take up new routes.

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The experts singled out the simplicity of jetBlue's snack boxes and the variety of offerings at smaller airlines such as Alaska, Virgin America and Hawaiian.

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So far as I can tell, Alaska Airlines was not objecting to deregulation itself, so implicitly it wanted to treat the EPP as severable from deregulation, but it wantred to treat the legislative veto as inseparable from the rest of the EPP.

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