Well with the release of Swift from iOS, I can truly say that Adobe just got an agreement with Apple and dropped out AIR in their favor. It's too much of coincidence to have a language so close to AS, with all that "addChild" methods and concepts of design..
But the real frustration here, that lead me to that thoughts, is that people like Lee Brimelow and the almighty Thibault just left AS, and are now advertising Swift as the new awesome language.. This is not a coincidence too.
I would ask Adobe how many people from the AS/AIR team now work on Swift?