If you buy a plane ticket for the future, in a bankruptcy, you become an unsecured creditor of the airline.

Unless you pay for it with a credit or debit card, which probably accounts for pretty much every ticket sold in the US.

In other words, this is simply not true. The airline's acquiring bank bears the bulk of the risk for almost all flights (except for those purchased extremely far out, i.e. much more than a year, and some other edge cases).