The worst-hit airlines, including United, America West and US Airways, have sought relief in the second tranche of federal aid, a $10bn loan guarantee scheme.
But focusing on the scheme as the solution to the carriers' woes misses the point: the airline industry was already one wave away from drowning in red ink.
As Tom Gallagher, an investment banker at Wachovia, puts it, analysts had already been expecting a $2bn annual loss for the carriers last summer. "Then September 11 happened, and the airlines didn't have to explain why they were losing so much money."
The traditional airline business model was already becoming unviable because of the convergence of several trends: changing buying patterns for business travel, the growth of low-cost carriers and the acceptance of internet purchasing.
This combination has caused many to ask whether the traditional airline cost structure can ever support such a diminished revenue outlook. "One at a time they will all have to head for the bankruptcy courts," concludes one airline economist.
The economics of airlines have long been tough. As Robert Crandall, former chairman of American Airlines, observed, "The airline industry has lost as much money as it has made since the Wright brothers invented manned flight at Kitty Hawk back in 1903."
In January a study by Morgan Stanley and Stern Stewart put some statistical flesh on that anecdote. "The industry has not earned a return exceeding the cost of capital over most of the last two business cycles since airline deregulation in 1978 and it creates little wealth."
Carol Hallett, president of the Air Transport Association, noted recently: "The bottom line is this, the economic underpinnings of the airline industry are highly fragile even at the best of times."
Those times came in the late 1990s - a period of record profits. Even so, success during that period has helped sow current problems.
"You might say the change imperative was put on hold during the economic bubble that characterised the late 1990s," says Mr Carty. "It is interesting to look at the yields or the amount per passenger mile during the last decade. The line is almost flat - the only break is a blip during the 1998-1999 timeframe, which coincided with the bubbles in telecoms and technology IPOs, in the stock market and every other excess of the period."
According to the American Express monthly air fare monitor, the ratio between business and leisure fares widened from 2.5 times in 1996 to five times, as business fares rose more than 75 per cent since 1997.
Business travellers have started to rebel - average business fares fell last year for the first time since 1994. The high prices teamed with pressures on business costs have made companies eager to exploit cheaper fares. Amex estimates more than 40 per cent of corporate tickets are cheaper advanced purchase fares, up from 25 per cent two years ago.
The internet has made searching easier and pricing more transparent. Although the permanence of the shift to bargain-hunting is hard to gauge, Michael E. Levine, a former senior airline executive and academic at Yale, suggests the industry is reaching a tipping point "where it changes from someone buying a [discount] ticket because it is adventurous, to a point where everybody is doing it".
Interest in cheap deals has combined with availability. While low-cost carriers such as Southwest have been around for some time, new entrants such as JetBlue have added to critical mass and are moving into long-haul, says Kevin Mur phy at Morgan Stanley. "It's a "It's the last thing the legacy carriers needed."
Geoff Campbell, finance director at American, highlighted the threat. "Last year in the second quarter about 65 per cent of domestic available seat miles was in direct competition with low cost carriers. This year it was 75 per cent."
Concern that revenues may never rebound to levels that conferred profitability has prompted Mr Carty to conclude: "We simply cannot wait for people to get over their 9/11 jitters or for a cyclical economic recovery to bail us out. We must face up to the need for some fundamental changes in the way we do business."
They may have to start by looking at their cost structure. Airlines are haunted by the long-term wage contracts signed during the boom. Last week, for example, United Airlines reported that in spite of an 18 per cent fall in employee numbers, salary rates rose 17 per cent year on year. Mr Carty concedes: "It is no secret that labour costs have greatly outpaced productivity."
At the same time, though, airlines are facing cost pressures outside their control - added security and the hassle factor at airports, which ranges from customers forced to remove shoes for swabbing to extra frisking. Airports have to introduce new baggage screening by the end of the year. According to Susan Donofrio, analyst at Deutsche Bank, this could cause delays during the peak holiday season and put off revenue recovery until 2003.
So what is the way out of this? Confusion remains. Continental argues that the business model is not yet broken. Northwest has survived better than most, cutting capacity and tweaking business fares. American, by contrast, is contemplating a radical rethink to compete more effectively with airlines such as Southwest.
United's president, Rono Dutta, is more circumspect. "We looked at major restructuring, such as shrinking or moving downscale to more leisure products, but rejected these as unworkable. As difficult as it is to be a high-cost carrier in the high-end market, it is worse to be a high-cost carrier in the low-end market."
The industry is not short of initiatives. Airlines have tried everything from dumping excess aircraft in the Arizona desert, hacking travel agency commissions, ending discounts for the elderly, cutting airline food, introducing cheaper walk-on business fares, shifting to electronic ticketing, changing corporate discounts, cutting capacity and changing schedules through to pressing unions for wage cuts.
Industry bodies have looked for tax cuts. Investment banks prefer the option of consolidation. For Mr Murphy, the new economics have only one solution. "The airline sector will increasingly move towards consolidation as the only viable way to achieve a return on capital."
In spite of the plethora of measures, confusion and a finger-crossing hope in a cyclical rebound still prevails across the industry. But with the industry carrying more than $110bn of debt and bleeding cash, that approach looks wildly optimistic.