Why are many US airlines owned by a parent company?
United - UAL Corp
American AMR Corp
Northwest Airlines, Inc. - Northwest Airlines Corporation.
Is there some accounting reason behind it?
Yup.
Many airlines also offer peripheral services such as ground services, freight and cargo operations, maintenance and logistics, etc. which are all structured under their own corporations as well.
I just finished a class on airline structure and business practices, and it laid out that most major airlines are structured this way so that a “holdings corporation” is really the parent.
The business reasons behind it are legal and technical (and my texts didn’t really get into that too much), but I suspect it has to do with loss control, i.e. the floundering freight operations of one airline doesn’t threaten the rest of the airline as a whole.
I’ll have to look into those texts again tonght. I did a fairly good report on Evergreen International, which has one branch that has a museum underneath the parent holding company.
Tripler
You don’t want your museum to bring down the Desert Nomad Inc. conglomerate, do you?
Actually Desert Nomad Inc. is a subsidiary of Desert Nomad Worldwide Enterprises which maintains its global headquarters and secret hideout in Pacmanistan. 