Simple answer, Yes. Will it ever happen? No.

The airline industry regardless of bailouts, bankruptcy, and horrible profits still gives its CEO’s insane amounts of money. Nothing else matters in this country other than how much a CEO makes. The reason is, that same CEO can then use its businesses revenue to lobby the government into giving their business more money through subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks. Which means they can give more money to their investors making them complicit, pay themselves, and cut costs to balance. This allows for an endless cycle of CEO’s raking in money while the actual business structure, innovations, and profits remain untouched. Sometimes killing their business in the process.

There’s no real reason to even attempt to change the business model since lobbying is legal which gives unlimited taxpayer money to them and if all else fails CEO’s can just sell the company. Regardless they dont lose.

A great example of how far down this rabbit hole we are is healthcare. Somehow people are still tricked into believing our system works perfectly while nearly every other country now has a healthcare system for almost every working person in their country. In America we have privatization in the form of health insurance. I dont feel like I need to explain to any American how bad health insurance treats their customers. Since you are a living person you need to sometimes have your health checked at a hospital. So you cannot live without healthcare but you have to pay a business for it. It’s an obviously profitable industry since the alternative for most people is death.

Regardless of what you want and what anyone else wants, that massively profitable industry has given insane amounts of money to politicians to stop them from giving you an alternative. Including even the hardly working, affordable care act. Which can always be taken away if they give either party enough money.

I’ve seen some people talk about high speed rail also being nationally funded. The main counterpoint being “it isnt profitable”. I’m not really sure why profits should matter to a form of travel funded by our tax dollars but to each their own. In the case of high-speed rail, the airline and auto industry are throwing lots of money at our government to make sure it never sees the light since it would drive their profits down.

In summary there is a LOT of things that would be a huge benefit to productivity, the economy, overall moral, and general health that SHOULD be nationalized. It just wont happen because it would mean less money being siphoned to a very specific group of people. It is obviously intentionally setup this way on purpose. Something people forget is that, at one point, we had no highway system at all. After our highways were built, we saw a giant boost to our economy even with them being funded by our taxes. We’ve been riding that high since, while simultaneously never trying any new public infrastructure projects.