Exiting the customs area at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport after an international flight last weekend, I waded into a sea of private-car drivers waiting for passengers. There among the black-suited men holding hand-written signs was a nattily dressed fellow ostentatiously cradling an iPad with his client's name elaborately displayed on the screen.

"Ah," I thought. "It's travel's silly season again."

If you've flown on business over the years, you know that January is the slowest month for air travel. Business flyers are mostly stuck behind their desks. Leisure travelers, strapped for cash after an orgy of holiday spending, aren't parting with vacation funds. Kids are in school, so families can't fly. It's not so cold in the north yet that the snowbirds are headed south. And skiers are skeptical about snow this early in the season, so they stay home too.

All this quietude leads to silliness—and not just from bored limo drivers finding new uses for their iPads. With little actual news to write about, airline beat reporters and other media types have to invent stories and speculate wildly about stuff that'll never happen.

This year is no exception. In fact, if anything, the media is loonier then ever, spinning yarns and pushing memes that would be easily dismissed as preposterous except for that fact that some impressionable business traveler might actually take the stuff seriously.

Please watch your metaphoric step as you follow me down the rabbit hole to demolish some of the stories dominating the vast wasteland of business travel in January.

Delta Air Lines May Buy American Airlines

I told you a few weeks ago that American Airlines faced a bleak future as an independent carrier because no airline that has gone bankrupt since the September 11 terrorist attacks has survived without a subsequent merger or buyout.

But Delta Air Lines, the nation's No. 2 carrier, buying or merging with American, the No. 3 player? It is a media meme that can only make the rounds during the silly season of January. You should ignore with confidence any business story that suggests such a proposal could logically occur.

For starters, a Delta-American combination would control fully 50 percent of the full-size jet service in the nation. Even assuming the Department of Transportation would permit that kind of concentration (it wouldn't), the Justice Department would logically go berserk. Justice just finished frustrating a much less dangerous potential merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. And unless Delta was to put a multibillion-dollar breakup clause in a deal (a la AT&T's ill-fated contract with T-Mobile), why would American Airlines waste the time?

American, you should know, is sitting on a cash horde of $4 billion and didn't need to arrange debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing to ride out its run in bankruptcy court. That gives American staying power far beyond the minimum 120-day exclusivity clause that permits only American executives to file a reorganization plan with the court.

Moreover, any "carve outs" and divestments that Delta or American could imagine to win government approval for a merger would be economic suicide. American and Delta directly compete in the nation's two largest air-travel markets (New York and Los Angeles) and have competing hubs just a few hundred miles apart throughout the rest of the country. Any divestitures would be so huge as to far exceed the benefits of a merger.

Does American need a merger or buyout partner? Recent history says yes. But look to Alaska Airlines, US Airways, or even JetBlue Airways—or perhaps some sort of pseudo-merger with British Airways and Iberia, American's Oneworld Alliance partners. American and Delta just can't happen.