Spirit Airlines shut down Saturday after 34 years, grounding its fleet of bright yellow planes and leaving roughly 17,000 employees without jobs — some of whom had spent over two decades with the carrier.
The airline began as Charter One in the early 1980s before reinventing itself around a radical idea: strip the ticket price down to almost nothing, then charge separately for everything else — bags, seat selection, even printing a boarding pass. Critics called it nickel-and-diming. CEO Ben Baldanza called it honesty. Either way, it worked — at least for a while.
Spirit’s model was so disruptive that legacy carriers eventually had no choice but to follow, launching their own “basic economy” fares. The student became the standard. Then the standard undercut the student.
Years of mounting losses, two bankruptcy filings in as many years, and a failed bid for emergency financing from the Trump administration left the airline on life support. The final blow came from surging jet fuel prices triggered by the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, which pushed crude above $100 a barrel. Spirit simply ran out of runway.
On its last day of operations, the airline flew over 50,000 passengers safely. Then it was over.
“While the country has had a blast making Spirit the butt of the joke,” the flight attendants’ union wrote to members, “we’ve built a strength together that could withstand anything.”
