You have said it in this piece. The two airlines are from totally different origins. Dumping one name in favour of the other is a death threat to the existence of the airlines. There is no strong reason to drop either name. You forget the existence of Horizon Air which is the regional airline of Alaskan but is not limited to a region. Do you forget the use of multiple brands in groups such as LH, IAG or even in AF/KLM, not forgetting Ryanair with Lauda, Buzz and Malta Air?
The next logical merger would be Alaska /Hawaiian with Jet Blue. This gives greater force to my argument of maintaining original names. You forget sometimes that many people do not like change. This gives us a strong argument to maintain the original names while in the background the airlines are merging systems and services which are not obvious to the customer, so achieving their synergies.
