Basically this is the third round of layoffs announced at Spirit this year.
(This time they are even selling planes.)
They have negative working capital and a tangble net worth of (positive) $1.1 billion.
They have lost around a half billion a year every year for the past 4 years
(during a post-pandemic travel boom)
Jet Blue tried to buy them out.
The WH blocked the move, saying something about giant super-profitable evil greedy corporations eliminating competition.
Of course the company wasnt profitable, (a LOT of corporations aren’t) and the competition was going to disappear anyway, just in a much more orderly fashion.
Maybe the Biden administration will let this one go through.
Government needs to stay out of this.
For the record, I flew Spirit once, and decided never to fly them again if I had other choices. So I’m not saying this to argue for Spirit’s survival. (And I’m in the same boat with Frontier. Both are on my last-resort list.)
Maybe the problem is spirit is just a poorly run airline. It’s been losing a ton of money. Rather than let jet blue buy them let them go bankrupt. And let their gate slots be auctioned off in a free market
I am completely open to this thread being used to discuss all sort of trust/anti-trust pro-competition issues.
In the US, such legal issues are handled by (at least) two independent and overlapping agencies. (The FTC & the anti-trust division of the DoJ have seperate heads and operate idndependently of each other. Kinda like if you commit a drug crime, you might be investigated by the FBI the DEA, the local police etc. all simultansously.)
Each of them is headed by a Wihitehouse appointee who can be removed at the whim of the Whitehouse. Each of them should be treated with at least the large degree of skepticism (mistrust) that is owed to all parts of the government.
That said the Spirit/Frontier merger is being blocked by the DoJ, which should not be trusted, but is not nearly as hair-on-fire leftist-whacky as Lina Kahn’s FTC.
I’ll walk before I’ll get on a Spirit plane after having two flights canceled in a row and being denied a refund, only credit. If I remember correctly the credit had to be used within one year. They flat out stole my money. Not only do they not deserve to be in business, the leadership should be in jail.
That is the stuff that puts companies out of business. One person turns into 10, then into 1000, and they tell everyone they know. Just based on what you said, I would never fly Spirit.
I am very very skeptical about the DoJ decision to block the merger.
Their decision doesn’t make sense to me.
There is definitely trouble in the airline industry.
The stories you may have read about “revenge travel” and “The consumeris strong people are paying for experiences” are rughly as true as the stories you’ve read about Biden-Harris craing the most jobs in world history. (Depends on your measuring point.)
The red line and the blue line below shpow two popular ways of measuring domestic airline revenue. As we can see both are below the pre-pandemic trend.
That said, the severity of Spirit Airline’s problems seem to be unique to Spirit.
All the other airlines seem to be treating this like a downturn in business.
They shake their heads and laugh at the super-positive reports about the great travel economy, but only Spirit seems to be on its deathbed.
See the red arrow at the end here?
For everyone else it is more like a sideways arrow.
. Thanks I’ll wait for 
