Here Lies Spirit Airlines (1983-2026)
Another low-cost option disappears
The school bus of the skies is no more. On Saturday, May 3rd, after 34 years in business, Spirit Airlines shut down. The company had been circling the drain for months, and filed for bankruptcy in both November 2024 and August 2025. A failed merger with JetBlue tightened the screws. Finally, rising fuel prices proved to be the final nail in the coffin. Hemorrhaging money and unable to keep the lights on, the closure stranded thousands of passengers who flew on an outbound Spirit flight only to discover no plane would be there to take them home.
How things have changed. A pioneer in the ultra-low-cost airline model, Spirit offered barebones flights at rock bottom prices. Passengers had to pay for everything, from checked bags to bottles of water to printed boarding passes. Decried by many for nickel and diming their customers, these low prices helped usher in the current age of flying, open to anyone who can scrounge together a small chunk of change.
Only a decade ago, Spirit Airlines was putting serious pressure on the competition. Their cheap fares undercut all other airlines. The “Spirit effect” had been noted for years by airline industry watchers. When Spirit Airlines began a new route, other airlines immediately lost business. This forced all airlines, including often Spirit itself, to lower fares. This usually worked to Spirit’s advantage. The airline regularly turned a profit until Covid hit all airlines with a sledgehammer. We may look back to the 2010s as the cheapest time to fly in history. If so, Spirit Airlines was one of the root causes.
There are several reasons for Spirit’s demise. The first, which often goes overlooked, is that the airline business is brutal. Massive fix costs, never-ending maintenance, and unreliable demand have always made it tough to be profitable. Less we forget, Pan Am, one of the most recognizable American companies and unofficial flagship carrier for the US, closed its doors in 1991 after more than 60 years. Other airlines have come and gone since. Far from being a bad thing, this is the sign of a healthy market. Incumbent firms get complacent and are disrupted by new entrants.
Second, there were a lot of people who hated Spirit Airlines. Some of this distaste was misplaced. Contrary to popular belief, their efficiency and safety were above average. The airline never had a crash, even a minor one. On-time arrival percentages were about average, with Spirit Airlines below Delta and Southwest but above United and American in 2025. When it came to satisfaction, however, Spirit was dismal. According to JD Power’s 2026 North America Airline Satisfaction Study, Spirit only ranked above WestJet and Frontier. It turns out that customers may take the cheapest option when buying a ticket but then regret it later. Having low prices is nice, but over time, airlines need customer loyalty, and Spirit had not built up any goodwill. At times they seemed to be intentionally making life difficult for customers. And low prices need not beget unhappy customers. Allegiant Air, another low-cost carrier similar to Spirit, has an average customer satisfaction rating. Spirit really went out of its way to make customers angry.
Having flown Spirit around five times in the last decade, I found the experience to be acceptable. The lack of legroom was never any fun, and the absence of a large tray table was annoying, but you get what you pay for. One thing I liked about Spirit that most others hated was the aggressive flight attendants. There is nothing more infuriating than when boarding passengers act like they are the only ones on the plane and block the aisle to slowly reorganize their belongings into the overhead bins. Every flight is assigned a roughly 10-minute departure window. Miss that, and your plane gets bumped to the back of the queue. Spirit flight attendants were the only ones I’ve seen to forcefully tell passengers to clear the aisle as they try to fish their headphones out of the bottom of their backpack and block everyone else from reaching their seat. That made the planes board quicker and reduced delays.
The third reason for Spirit’s demise was changes by the competition. Legacy carriers began to offer “basic economy”, which copies the Spirit approach of a low price with many add-ons. Combined with their loyalty programs, this removed one of the key reasons to fly Spirit. Customers could now pay a low price and fly with a legacy carrier, avoiding the stigma of a low-cost carrier while, at least in some cases, still earning mileage points. Without a competitive edge, Spirit was doomed.
Unfortunately, this all may have been avoided. In 2022, Spirit announced that it would be bought by JetBlue. The proposed merger would have created the nation’s fifth-largest airline, behind American, Delta, Southwest, and United. The Biden Administration aggressively opposed the merger, saying it would reduce competition and increase prices. In January 2024, Judge William G. Young sided with the government and blocked the merger.
Let the Monday morning quarterbacking begin.
Republicans immediately began blaming Democrats, specifically former President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for Spirit’s demise. Obviously, the argument goes, the Biden administration was wrong to sue to prevent Spirit and JetBlue from merging, and the judge was wrong to side with the government. Spirit said they would go bankrupt if the merger was blocked, and they did. This argument has its merits, but is heavily biased by hindsight. It is common for companies to say they need to merge to prevent bankruptcy. That doesn’t mean it’s true. On top of that, JetBlue stated they would change Spirit’s business model to be like theirs, which is an implicit admission that fares would rise.
The better argument for allowing the merger is that by creating a fifth airline that would rival the existing big four, fares may go up in some markets, but overall the industry will benefit and consumers will not be significantly harmed. It seems odd to block any merger that will create the fifth-largest firm in the industry. At the time it looked to many that the Biden Administration was being overly aggressive and singling out a merger unnecessarily. Spirit’s bankruptcy just two years later doesn’t prove that to be true, but does put a bit of egg on everyone’s face. Yes, allowing the merger may have caused fares to rise. But it’s incorrect to draw the conclusion that blocking the merger will keep fares low. As it turns out, that was going to happen in either case.
The result is the demise of America’s least liked airline. Yet, it is a bit of a sad day. Spirit was not pleasant to fly. But it allowed people to fly who were otherwise priced out of the market. It was a disrupter, to the point that its competitors copied its strategies even while ridiculing its business model. As a recent Atlantic headline puts it, “The Only Thing Worse Than Spirit Airlines… is a world without Spirit Airlines”.