US Airways readies for integration

Charlotte, North Carolina

ON Oct 17, at 12.01 am, the website of US Airways will go dark. The airline's reservation system will power down. Hours later, its last flight, a red-eye from San Francisco, will kiss the runway in Philadelphia. With that, US Airways will disappear as a brand. And its tens of thousands of employees and 655 planes will enter an unknown new world - that of American Airlines.

Over the past 15 years in the United States, a burst of airline mergers has created a group of mega-airlines - including American - that rank as four of the world's five largest by passengers carried. But combining airlines has proved difficult and at times created fresh complications for harried travellers. While some of the mergers have worked well, others - particularly between United and Continental - have required constant triage, resulting in technical malfunctions and recurring, headache-inducing delays and flight cancellations. That is why, for US Airways, its last phase as a company might also be its most important.