Since the coins only have “value” for the airline, the company could just store them in a centralized database and write a program for users to authorize trades

Since the coins only have “value” for the airline, the company could just store them in a centralized database and write a program for users to authorize trades. The only benefit of crypto-coins is that if the airline were to go bankrupt, the coins would still exist and could be used as any other crypto-currency. And the value would probably crash anyways.