Do they? Afaik, they don't [1].

> WONG: However, Gerry says most of the major airlines in the U.S. eventually soured on fuel hedging. One reason - the Wall Street transaction fees to make these hedges got expensive.

> WOODS: Plus, Gerry says the airlines found that they could make money the old-fashioned way by raising prices. Today, none of the major airlines in the U.S. are hedging.

Hedging is one of those things that sounds cool but then when your service is x% more expensive than a competitor and you lose customers you just stop doing it. It's kinda like being on AWS; when everybody has an outage together nobody asks "oh what can be done differently".

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-5759203/fuel-hedging-on...