Pledges Pour In for Spirit Airlines after It Announced Shutdown
Early this month, Spirit Airlines made headlines across the country and abroad as it shut down operations and suddenly canceled all flights. The financially troubled budget carrier that made flying affordable to millions across America for over 30 years cited rising jet fuel prices as the final blow to its struggle to survive. Now, its survival has taken a new turn and it’s up to the people.
Spirit’s financial troubles became obvious in the aftermath of the COVID-19 health emergency when aviation all over the country and internationally suffered heavily from lack of customers. In 2022, the airline warmed up to merger with JetBlue under an agreement worth nearly $4 billion. But then it came under attack by the Biden administration, which sued to block the merger arguing that it would raise flight prices and reduce competition.
In 2024, federal judge William Young ruled in favor of the Biden administration and killed the Spirit-JetBlue merger. The ruling threw Spirit into financial turmoil again and the airline filed for bankruptcy twice in less than a year. While carrying with its financial burden under bankruptcy, the rising fuel costs caused by the US-Iran war dealt a final blow to Spirit. As a last resort, the Florida-based airline asked the Trump administration for an emergency bailout worth $500 million. Their request was denied by the federal government. Spirit reached the end of its rope and announced its shutdown.
With nearly 17000 employees losing their livelihood, the end of Spirit was alarming news of national importance. Republicans blamed Democrats for damaging the company to its end.
And Democrats blamed Trump for making jet fuel unaffordable by waging war on Iran and leading to the interruption of oil supply worldwide.
So what happens to a business when both sides fail it? It dies – unless people decide to save it. Just days after Spirit’s announcement of closing down, vlogger and voice actor Hunter Peterson launched a fundraising campaign to save the airline. The fundraising campaign website Letsbuyspiritair.com is titled “Spirit 2.0 Owned by the People.” The site says:
Spirit didn’t fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could. The routes are real. The demand is real. The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.
People who want to revive Spirit can pledge $45 or more and become a shareholder in the airline. The people’s response to this effort has been encouraging with pledges pouring in from all over the place. At the time of this writing, the campaign has raised $337 million in non-binding pledges against a target of $1.75 billion.
Will Spirit make it and fly again? Who knows? The Democrats failed it. The Republicans failed it. Maybe the Americans will save it. And if they do, Spirit can fly again as an airline owned truly by the American people.
In capitalism, the market is the arbitrator of all things, supposedly.
My FIL, a sommelier at the fanciest NYC clubs in the 50’s and 60’s once told me: a blended wine is like putting two good wines together hoping for greatness. Not going to happen. Works for coffee too; if the coffee for flavored coffee was great, wouldn’t add flavor. He was right, but I think he might like today’s blended wines; they have come a long way and he was not a snob, just drinking wine from age 7 on (watered down of course).
That’s what the Jet Blue-Spirit merger was, putting two troubled airlines together expecting two wrongs might make a right. Spirit filed bankruptcy 2024, 2025, and now — DOA-2026. Jet Blue been in trouble for awhile and looks to be next in bankruptcy unless someone sees something worth buying. On top of everything else, and there’s a lot of everything else, twas the gas prices that killed the airlines. If you are teetering and get hit with these wartime prices, good chance you will fall. It is that simple. If they had merged, it would still be the same.
Fact is no one is buying Spirit so far. They have been “on the block” for over five years. No one is even buying their assets. Trump bailed out too many companies this year by buying in; Spirit was a bridge too far even for Trump to spend spend someone else’s money to save them. Frontier tried in 22, Jet Blue in 24, United looked and passed saying too many issues.
This plan to publicly finance them is a long shot, the finance owner calls it a joke, because the problems still remain. That’s called capitalism where one should think long and hard before trying to save every puppy in the pound. Republicans used to tout capitalism. Then they got the power and now they buy companies like a socialist on a shopping spree. The run up deficits lie a drunken sailor on shore leave after 2 years at sea. Dempsey in pooh-poohing Spirit’s demise sounds more communist than capitalist.