Every Airline Is BLEEDING — So Why Is DELTA Airlines Winning?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Spirit Airlines is dead, gone, finished.

[00:00:03]The last Spirit flight took off in May 2026.

[00:00:07]Meanwhile, Delta Airlines just posted its best quarterly earnings in 3 years.

[00:00:12]Both companies sell plane tickets, both fly through the same skies, deal with the same weather, compete for the same passengers. So, how is one of them celebrating record profits while the other one no longer exists? The answer isn't better customer service. It isn't nicer seats or a prettier app. It comes down to fuel and two decisions Delta made over a decade ago that every single competitor thought was unnecessary, over complicated, or just plain stupid.

[00:00:41]Today, we're going to break down exactly how Delta built a machine that turns fuel crises into competitive advantages, and why no other airline was willing to do the same. Most people think of an airline as a transportation company. You buy a ticket, you get on a plane, you go somewhere. Simple. But from a financial perspective, an airline is really just a machine for burning jet fuel and hoping the revenue from ticket sales covers the cost. Jet fuel isn't just one of many costs an airline manages. On average, fuel represents between 20 and 30% of an airline's total operating expenses. To put that in perspective, crew salaries are significant, but they are locked in by union contracts negotiated years in advance. Aircraft maintenance is expensive, but it is scheduled and predictable. Airport gate fees and landing slots are negotiated on long-term agreements. Nearly every major cost an airline faces is either fixed or at least somewhat predictable. Fuel is none of those things. The price of jet fuel moves with the price of crude oil which moves with geopolitical events, OPEC decisions, natural disasters, currency fluctuations, and market sentiment, none of which any airline has any control over whatsoever. You cannot negotiate with oil markets. You cannot schedule around a fuel spike and you absolutely cannot fly planes without fuel. It is the one cost in the entire business that is simultaneously the largest, the most volatile, and the most unavoidable. This is the core problem every airline in the world faces. The question isn't whether fuel prices will spike. They always do. The question is what you've built to survive it when it happens.

[00:02:34]The standard industry response to fuel volatility is called hedging. Here is how it works in plain terms. Imagine you run a bakery and flour is your biggest cost. You do not know what flour will cost in 6 months, but you know you are going to need a lot of it. So, you go to a supplier today and sign a contract that locks in a price for flour you will buy 6 months from now. If flower prices shoot up, you are protected. You are still paying the lower price you locked in. If flower prices drop, you overpaid a little. But that is fine because the whole point was to remove the uncertainty, not to gamble on the outcome. Airlines do the same thing with fuel. They sign futures contracts that lock in a purchase price for jet fuel months or even years ahead of time. If prices spike, the contracts pay out and offset the higher cost at the pump. If prices fall, the airline paid a bit more than it needed to, the cost of the insurance.

[00:03:42]The standard approach across the industry is to hedge somewhere between 50 and 70% of your expected fuel consumption at any given time. Most airlines run this through a treasury department, a team of analysts who manage the contracts, report the results quarterly, and keep the hedgebook ticking over. It is entirely defensive by design. The goal is simply to survive a spike without going under.

[00:04:12]Delta does something fundamentally different. Delta does not treat its hedgebook as an insurance policy. It treats it as an active commodity position, more like a trading operation than a treasury function. Their team constantly monitors the structure of the futures market. They pay close attention to whether the market is in contango, where prices for future delivery are higher than today's [music] prices, or in backidation, where the opposite is true. Based on that structure, they adjust how much fuel they have hedged, at what price points, and for how long.

[00:04:46]They use more sophisticated instruments like collar structures that put a ceiling and a floor on their exposure simultaneously. They extend or shorten the duration of their hedgebook based on where they think the market is heading.

[00:04:58]This is not a standard airline operation. This is a commodity trading desk that happens to be embedded inside an airline. And the results show up directly in the numbers. In 2023, Delta paid an average of $289 per gallon of jet fuel. United paid $34 per gallon. American paid $311 per gallon. On the surface, a gap of 22 cents does not sound like much. But here's the thing. Delta burns approximately 4 billion gallons of jet fuel every single year. Multiply 22 cents by 4 billion and you get $880 million. That is $880 million in structural cost advantage over the nearest competitor every year. Generated not by flying better routes, not by selling more premium seats, not by any of the things that show up in marketing campaigns, just by being smarter about how they buy fuel. That is the first machine.

[00:06:00]Now, here's where Delta's thinking goes further than anyone else in the industry, and where it gets really interesting. Hedging works brilliantly for short-term fuel spikes. A crisis hits, prices shoot up for a quarter or two, the hedgebook pays out. The airline absorbs the hit without catastrophic damage. Prices normalize. Everyone moves on. That is the scenario hedging is designed for and it handles it well. But what happens if the crisis does not end in one quarter? What if fuel prices stay elevated for 12, 18 or 24 months?

[00:06:34]Futures contracts have expiry dates. the hedgebook rolls over at whatever the new market price is. If oil stays high long enough, eventually you're locked in contracts expire and you are buying fuel at full elevated market prices just like everyone else. At that point, your hedgebook is no longer protecting you.

[00:06:53]It is just a memory of when prices were better. Spirit Airlines had hedges.

[00:06:58]United had hedges. American had hedges.

[00:07:01]They all had contracts in place, but those contracts expire. And if the crisis outlasts the contracts, the protection disappears. Delta understood [music] this structural limitation back in 2012. They looked at their hedgebook, [music] recognized its limits, and decided they needed something that did not expire, something permanent, something built into the balance sheet rather than sitting on top of it. So they bought a refinery. In April 2012, Delta purchased the Monroe Energy Refinery in Trainer, Pennsylvania. The facility had previously been owned by Konico Phillips and was weeks away from permanent closure. Delta paid $150 million for the asset and another $100 million to reconfigure it specifically for jet fuel production. Total investment $250 million. The reaction from Wall Street was immediate and almost uniformly negative. Analysts called it a distraction from the core business. Financial commentators questioned whether airline management had lost the plot. One well-known television host called it a mistake live on air. The general consensus was that an airline had no business operating an industrial [music] refining facility and that Delta's management had made a classic empire building error, spending shareholder money on something completely outside their area of expertise. They were all looking at the wrong thing.

[00:08:28]Here's how a refinery actually works.

[00:08:30]You take crude oil in one end and the refining process breaks it down into multiple different products simultaneously. Jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, heating oil, NAFTA and others.

[00:08:42]The mix of outputs varies and the profit earned on each depends on the price of the crude input and the realtime market demand for each refined product. Monroe processes around 200,000 barrels per day. Delta consumes roughly 4% of all jet fuel used in the United States each year. Monroe covers approximately 80,000 barrels per day of Delta's total fuel requirement. Somewhere between 25 and 30% of everything they need to fly their entire network. That alone is significant, but it is not the clever part. The key concept is the crack spread. This is the difference between what a refinery pays for crude oil as an input and what it earns from selling refined products as an output. It is essentially the refinery's profit margin per barrel processed. Here is what matters. When jet fuel demand is high and crude oil supply is constrained, exactly the market conditions that produce a fuel price spike, the crack spread widens. Refineries earn more money precisely when fuel is most expensive for everyone buying it on the open market. This is not a coincidence or a loophole. It is simply how refining economics work. When the product becomes scarce and valuable, the people producing it capture more of that value.

[00:10:05]What this means for Delta is structural and profound. When fuel prices spike, two things happen to a normal airline.

[00:10:12]Their costs go up and their hedgebook provides partial temporary relief. That is it. Two tools, both working to limit the damage. When fuel prices spike for Delta, a third thing happens at the same time. Monroe's refining margin expands and Monroe generates more revenue.

[00:10:30]Delta's fuel cost is going up in one part of the business while Monroe's profitability is going up in another part of the same business. The two forces partially cancel each other out automatically without anyone needing to make a decision in the middle of a crisis. In early 2022, when jet fuel prices surged following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, virtually every United States airline reported serious fuel cost headwinds and significant margin compression. Delta reported that Monroe Energy generated a positive financial contribution that same quarter. Refinery profit expanded while fuel costs rose simultaneously. Two machines pulling in opposite directions at exactly the moment the crisis was most severe.

[00:11:19]Now the critics have a point that Monroe is not consistently profitable in every market condition. When oil is cheap and refining margins are thin, Monroe underperforms. Delta has said this directly in earnings calls. It is true.

[00:11:34]But this objection completely misunderstands what Monroe was built for. Monroe was never designed to be a standalone profit center that earns money in every quarter, regardless of market conditions. It was designed to reduce the volatility of Delta's single largest uncontrollable cost. Modest underperformance during periods of cheap, stable fuel is not a failure of the strategy. It is exactly what the strategy is supposed to look like. The cost of running Monroe during easy times is the premium you pay for the protection it provides during hard times. You do not evaluate a smoke alarm by how often it goes off. You evaluate it by what happens when the fire starts.

[00:12:16]And when the fire started in 2022 and again in 2026, Monroe performed exactly as designed.

[00:12:26]So why didn't anyone copy it? If Monroe works this well, why does Delta still have the only airlineowned refinery in the United States? American evaluated the concept in 2012 and passed. United considered it and declined. Every major carrier looked at what Delta was doing and decided not to follow. The surface level reasons are real. Refineries are capital inensive. They require technical expertise that has nothing to do with aviation. They come with significant environmental and regulatory obligations. Running an industrial facility that processes 200,000 barrels per day is genuinely complex and airlines already have enormous operational complexity to manage. But [music] the deeper reason is simpler and more uncomfortable. The benefits take too long to show up. A refinery acquisition looks bad for the first 2 to 3 years. The capital is deployed. The operational costs start immediately. And the structural benefits only become visible when the next crisis arrives, which could be years away. During that window, quarterly earnings look worse.

[00:13:30]Analysts write negative notes.

[00:13:32]Shareholders ask uncomfortable questions on earnings calls, and competitors point to the underperformance as proof that the whole idea was misconceived. Airline executives are evaluated on quarterly earnings and short-term analyst consensus. Making a decision that deliberately hurts your near-term numbers to build a 20-year structural advantage requires a time horizon that the incentive structure of public company management actively discourages.

[00:13:57]Delta's leadership made that bet anyway.

[00:14:00]Nobody else did. Delta's loyalty program is worth more than the airline itself.

[00:14:06]Its credit card partnerships generate billions. Its premium cabin transformation has reshaped its revenue mix entirely. These are real impressive machines, but none of them function if fuel costs make the entire operation structurally unviable. The Hedgebook and Monroe Energy are the foundation that everything else sits on. They are the reason Delta can afford to run those other machines at all. Because when the fuel crisis hits, Delta is still standing while the competition is filing for bankruptcy. or in Spirit's case, ceasing to exist entirely. Two machines.

[00:14:42]One that saves $880 million a year by trading fuel smarter than everyone else.

[00:14:49]One that earns more money precisely when every other airline is losing it. Spirit Airlines priced a $29 seat, had no hedgebook and no refinery, and hope the fuel market would be kind. Delta built a system that does not need the fuel market to be kind. Rain or shine, crisis or calm, Delta profits from the same forces that destroy everyone else. That is not luck. That is engineering.

[00:15:17]Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Take care.