Well that didn’t last long. American Airlines, the biggest carrier in the world, set a new quarterly profit record, with a $1.9b net profit in the third quarter. Of course, there are some technicalities at play here, but it broke Delta’s two-week old record. Maybe even more astonishing was United’s $1.7b figure. Has United finally narrowed the performance gap between itself and Delta and American? Meanwhile all of these airlines look like a bunch of pikers compared to Alaska Airlines. Southwest did just fine, but not as well as Volaris (by operating profit margin anyway). Plus we check in on Tigerair, Vietnam Airlines and Norwegian.