Okay lets take a second and have a little history lesson here.
Early to mid 80s West Coast market structure, where PSA basically owned the West from Mexico to Seattle to some points east. Let's also remember that it was Southwest who paid PSA to teach them how to run a lean and mean machine.
Piedmont, on the other coast, was run leanly as well.
USAir, however, was lazily feeding off the fat of the land- and owned the market share of the highest yield in our nations route structure, and had the costs to prove it had little competition.
Fast forward to the buyout. Take an already fat airline, and buy two skinny airlines. What was the end result? An amazing route structure that with good management would have made USAir the premier US carrier. However, an arrogant management killed the airline to save their jobs and decimated what used to be a great carrier. How? By keeping too many middle managers than was necessary. And replacing larger airplanes on highly profitable transcon routes to put them on smaller segments with a lower yield. Poor decisions like this began USAir's demise and it began with Colodny. Undoubtedly, Mr. Colodny was an excellent executive - but in a GOOD economy. The lagging economy of the early 90s in combination with poorly thoughtout mergers started the ball rolling downhill. And when PSA was bought, and the paint changed, the smiles were wiped off more than just the airplanes.