Spirit Airlines is gone. Not “restructuring,” not “emerging stronger” — actually gone. Yellow planes parked in the Mojave, gates absorbed by Delta and United, flight attendants told to file unemployment claims via a QR code on the breakroom wall. The closest thing America had to a working-class national carrier just bled out in bankruptcy court while everyone pretended this was inevitable.
It wasn’t. The DOJ blocked the JetBlue merger to “protect competition,” which sounded reasonable right up until competition turned out to mean letting hedge funds peck at Spirit’s bones for two years until the carcass collapsed on its own. Now there’s less competition than ever, fares on Spirit’s old routes are up 40%, and the regulators who killed the merger have gone real quiet about how that worked out. Grandma flying Detroit to Fort Lauderdale to see her grandkids? She just got priced out of the sky. Mission accomplished.
This is the move every time. A company that actually serves regular people gets squeezed by private equity, the government either looks away or “protects” it to death, the workers eat the loss, and the customers eat the new prices. Spirit’s CEO walked off with $9.4 million in retention bonuses six weeks before the airline stopped existing. The flight attendants got a QR code. Tell me again how the market works.