This... makes sense? Airlines provide air transport services, and the actual "hardware" is pivotal but not integral to their core business. Airlines are much mo

This... makes sense? Airlines provide air transport services, and the actual "hardware" is pivotal but not integral to their core business. Airlines are much more than just "flying planes" — there's route planning, crew management, fuel pricing and forecasting, regulatory and legal compliance, operational logistics, landing/takeoff slot allotment, customer service, marketing, etc. that the airline is responsible for. Think of Netflix using AWS. Digital content delivery is obviously crucial to their business (DVD deliveries aside) but it's not vital that they own their own servers — they're first and foremost a video streaming service, not a CDN datacenter business. There are also various types of leases [1], commonly "wet" or "dry", which are analogous to managed/unmanaged/raw metal cloud services. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_lease