Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them.<p>Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere<p>Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do.<p>Useful watch (skip to 2:20): <a href="https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4?si=cyysP7aH_CIEDZRq" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4?si=cyysP7aH_CIEDZRq</a>
Why does any of this imply they should become a regulated utility? This seems like a textbook case of the free market pushing prices down to cost. Having alternative revenue streams pushed that minimal price down; but even without that, there is no reason to think the market would have done anything other than push prices to the lowest level possible in that environment as well.
Company makes too much money: "they're extracting monopolist rents! They need to be a regulated utility!"<p>Company makes too little money: "there's no money in this industry! They need to be a regulated utility!"
A more fair assessment would be: company runs a utility => they need to be a regulated utility!<p>The core part of air travel doesn’t really feel any different to a bus or metro or train. Off the tarmac then yes it absolutely feels like a Verizon store, as does some of the in-flight service, but there’s always been this weird feeling as a traveler that every carrier is basically the same thing but with different decals on it. Airline alliances are surely the ultimate example of this.
Have you ever flown spirit or any of the other ultra low cost carriers?<p>It very much is a different experience than flying a legacy domestic mainline carrier. I’m not alone amongst people i know who will happily fly the cheap seats on United/Delta/AA but won’t even look at a ticket from Spirit or Frontier even at a significant discount.<p>Compare it to a flag carrier like Singapore air and it is a shockingly different product.<p>All that’s an aside: we know what regulated airlines look like since we already tried it, much more expensive, with airlines competing not on price but on amenities.
I’ve flown Spirit and Frontier several times, and Southwest many times (I know they’re not quite in the same category, especially after their recent changes). I genuinely don’t know what you’re referring to regarding the experience being wildly different. Other than a few quirks about what they do and don’t charge for and how they board and assign seats, I feel like there’s almost no meaningful difference between these and legacy carriers like United and American. I honestly don’t even feel like the prices are consistently that different.
The two main differences are more armchair lawyering required to avoid fees (legacy carrier is often not going to put your bag in the dimension bin, but the Spirits and Frontiers of the world certainly will) and having to sit through three sales pitches instead of one on the legacy airlines. I think Delta is the only legacy carrier in the States that doesn't do obnoxious sales pitches - only the food cart upsell. Ryanair will come through with their hands out minimally three times since last time I rode them (though it's been several years, is it four now?)<p>One other difference I can think of is that carry-ons are more rarely included in the base fare in the budget airlines than the legacy airlines, though maybe that has also gone away since the changes where bags must be included in the listed price that Southwest pushed for.
I feel like you're living in a different universe then. I will literally never fly Spirit (well, neither will anyone else) nor Frontier ever, I loath the experiences I've had on them so much.<p>First, as someone with relatively long thighs, I literally don't fit in their sardine can seats. But more relevant to most people, while things may be OK if everything goes perfectly and nothing is delayed or cancelled, you are completely SOL with Spirit/Frontier if something goes wrong (and "something" may just be they themselves decide to cancel an undersold flight at the last minute). It's nearly impossible to get someone to talk to, I feel like the employees know how shitty their companies are so they all have an attitude like they DGAF, and it's a mad (expensive) scramble to find alternative arrangements at the last minute.<p>I've never had as abysmal experiences as I've had on Frontier compared to any other airline.
I’m relatively tall and have a generally rough (but tolerable) time with all domestic bottom-tier seats.<p>I have no difficulty believing you when it comes to customer service. I’ve never had any issues requiring anything beyond the most basic customer service, so I just haven’t been exposed to differences between airlines in that regard. I also understand that a bad experience can leave an exceptionally bad impression. I suppose the only thing that might surprise me is if the higher-cost airlines don’t also have terrible service.
From a customers' immediate point of view, this sucks for you.<p>But it's great they are not regulated utilities. Because either everyone would have to pay for extra legroom, even if they don't need it, or some freakishly long people would not be able to pay for the extra legroom that they need.
Yup, came here to say this. Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline. There's slight variation in terms of whether you get a whole can of coke for free or not. If you're taller than me, the 28" of seat pitch vs say 31" on delta may make a difference, but I'm only 5'9".<p>I still avoided them like the plague because the legacy carriers are selling you operational performance and the ability to usually get you where you're going within a reasonable timeframe if you're delayed or canceled. Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, whoever else, do not do nearly as good a job when something goes wrong. Although they should get a lot of credit - none of them have ever had a fatal crash.
You state an opinion, but not why for that opinion. I’m mostly stuck with Alaska or a small handful being a couple hours north of Seattle and driving to/dealing with SeaTac is not fun. In the caliber you said you wouldn’t travel includes aliegent.<p>I’ve not flown them and stick to Alaska and the local puddle jumpers to get off the island.
My company travel tool won't even let me book Spirit without it being flagged to HR.
Singapore Air is majority government owned and is closer to having “utility” airlines than not.
Conversely, Air India was majority government owned, did a pretty bad job of it, and is now privately owned.
Yes, Singapore Airline is government owned, but I don't see how it's a utility?
I think the <i>ultimate</i> example is the fact that most routes are run by other companies than the branded carrier; capacity providers like Endeavour and SkyWest just borrow the name and livery of the major carrier they're operating for that day.
Meanwhile, first class today is not very much more than coach cost in the regulated era.<p>Try flying Delta. It isn’t the cheapest option, but you really do get better service.<p>If you want to feel special, do Aeromexico first class. The checked bags are waiting for you before you can even walk there on a domestic flight.<p>Spirit was cheap. And if you’re poor, you need cheap. If you aren’t, buy better service and don’t complain that it’s just Greyhound on a plane.
Am I the only one who really doesn't care what kind of service I get on a plane? I don't drink alcohol, so I don't care about that. I bring my own water bottle, so I'm good on that. The little bags of pretzels are nice, but if they stood at the front and launched them out of a t-shirt cannon, I'd be good with that.<p>As long as the required crew of flight attendants doesn't assault me, I've never really got off a plane thinking anything at all about the service. Just "where do I need to go next" or "I'm glad to be home".
When your flights are delayed/resechduled there is a world of difference.
"Get in line" vs "you are already rebooked". (my Air Canada experince.)
> "Get in line" vs "you are already rebooked". (my Air Canada experince.)<p>Which of the two was the Air Canada experience?
Fair enough, I've been in those situations where the service on the ground side of the gate matters.
It's good that you don't care, and that you can self selected into getting the cheapest fare possible. The market works.
Company, always: "We need government subsidy". Then hell yes to regulating what they do.
Spirit wasn't asking for a government subsidy to get saved from bakruptcy. They were asking to be allowed to get merged with JetBlue (which could've saved them from bankruptcy) and got denied by the government. Those two things aren't the same.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Nobody asked for a government subsidy here, so what’s with the straw man?
Even with your uncharitable framing I agree with both quotes.
I like the EU model. The regulators set a "bare minimum" set of requirements. They have much better minimums that North America, and the fares are (still) cheaper per kilometer travelled. Also, I love the penalty system when flights are late.
Company is valuable to us as a society in a fundamental way but is fucking us up in all sorts of unique ways: They might need to be a regulated utility.
Okay, but the process of underwriting an airline now somehow involves operating a successful credit card company. Which, you know, are not typically successful based upon operating excellence but upon rapaciousness of interest rates and merchant fees.<p>I'm not sure it's great to have important infrastructure operated this way. Other than regulation do you see a way out?
Because the amount anyone would actually pay is substantially below cost for most routes, but it's still a service that many people depend on (either directly or by the indirect economic impact of travel). It's a genuine force multiplier that is unaffordable without being subsidized; making it a utility would just shift the subsidy from credit card points programs to the government.
If airlines didn’t exist, people and goods would continue to move around the globe as they have done for thousands of years. There’s nothing magical about air travel (or any other transport mode) that makes it worthy of subsidy .
When something is that drastically different, it becomes different in kind. For example, if you have high network latency, you cannot jam (play live music) with friends remotely. If you have low latency, you can. Just because the difference is in a single value (I.e. net speed) doesn’t mean it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s possible. Air travel makes the kind of business, shipping, and attendance possible that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, because our collective lifetimes and risk tolerances are limited.
Listen, I'm the type of fella who'd gladly take the Amtrak from the East Bay to Portland, 18 hours each way, and I'm telling you even I'd do so only as a novelty. If I actually had somewhere to be, spending basically an entire day on a train would be a non-starter. And that's just on the same coast! If I had to take the Amtrak back east to see my family for the holidays I would probably just not go. My travel to the other coast (not to mention back to the country where I was born, an additional ocean's worth of distance) would only be worth the trip for like a life change or a death in the family.<p>I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so, judging by both Amtrak ridership statistics and the cost ineffective nature of my attempts to travel on it.
I didn’t say anything about trains or Amtrak?<p>People and goods have travelled around the world long for thousands of years before air air travel and train travel. And people have made decisions above the trade-offs of travel to see family for thousands of years before air travel and train travel.<p>If air travel was unavailable or unsubsidized, people would continue to make those decisions and life would go on.
Do you oppose the federal highway system (or rail systems) as well?
You can't think of a single situation where an airline route is infinitely better and probably the only viable option ?<p>Btw you don't need to completely disregard other modes of transport to appreciate bus :)
Buses and planes are both great! Both have advantages and disadvantages, and different cost structures. I trust people to make their own decisions about trade-offs for travel that work for them and their situation. When we arbitrarily pick one and shovel free money, land or infrastructure toward it, we are putting a thumb on the scale and depriving people of the power to make their own decisions.<p>Of course, we can argue that there are network effects or natural monopoly effects for fixed infrastructure like roads and rails, and thus there must be a public role. However policy rarely seems to remain at this reasonable position and instead quickly expands into something altogether different.
If they are so much better, why do they need subsidies?
> <i>Because the amount anyone would actually pay is substantially below cost for most routes</i><p>This is absolutely not true. If all the airlines were prohibited from making money with anything else (miles, credit cards) then airfares would rise across the board and there would still be <i>plenty</i> of demand. Not as much, but still <i>plenty</i>.
> the amount anyone would actually pay is [...]<p>That's.... like a pretty shocking erasure of the idea of a demand curve given the forum here.<p>To be glib: no, that's not how it works. Increase the price and <i>fewer</i> people will fly, but the demand won't drop to zero. Decrease it and you make less money per ticket but the size of the market is bigger. At some point there is a local maximum, to which the market seeks.<p>But conditions change occasionally and the equivalent supply curve is moving rapidly because of the oil shock (i.e. it's more expensive to put planes in the air to service tickets you already sold). And things like the mess with Spirit are what happens when the market readjusts: the rest of the industry will (probably) backfill <i>some</i> of the lost capacity, but not all of it, and prices will (probably) rise a bit to a new equilibrium.
Airlines basically were a regulated utility until they were unregulated to the point where normal people can barely fit in a seat and there’s basically no amenities anymore. It used to be kind of nice to fly. That’s laughable now.
And then you have RyanAir in Europe with no credit card or loyalty program offerings. They <i>did</i> have a loyalty subscription program, but it cost more than it generated.<p>Best not to generalize.
Airlines were heavily regulated in the US and essentially operated as government contractors until 1978 [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Aeronautics_Board" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Aeronautics_Board</a>
Was it cheaper or more expensive for the public to fly on them during that time or after deregulation?
Yeah and it was an absurdly expensive activity limited to rich people
As I understand it, everything about the industry was better back then too.<p>Case in point: Old Perry Mason shows where characters regularly drive to the airport, pay for a ticket and get on a plane. Flying was actually faster than driving back then, even when measured by time between deciding to leave and arriving at destination!<p>(Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more. Whatever. Figure in the price for camping in the airport for 4-5 hours, and then tell me the current system is cheaper!)
"Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more"<p>Tickets used to cost 4-8x what they cost now, depending on route. It wasn't a couple percent extra. A lot of what made flying seem like such a glamorous activity was that everyone but the upper classes was excluded.<p>An economy class round trip from the US to Japan in the 1970s with Pan-Am was $8,900 in 2026 dollars. About $15,000 if you flew first class.
And for comparison, today you can do an economy round-trip flight with Delta Air Lines for roughly $1.6k (SEA-HND). A Delta One flight is roughly $8.5k. That's the apples-to-apples comparison.<p>Deregulation also allowed international carriers to sell to us too. An ANA round-trip on economy class is a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Their business class is similarly cheaper than Delta One.<p>Air travel is so much cheaper than it was back then that it is affordable for most people to take <i>one</i> international trip a year if they really want to. Even to exotic places in Asia or Southern Europe.
It would be prohibitively expensive for poor people to fly. I understand why you wouldn’t care about that, but some people are poor and still need to fly if you can believe it.
Or they could actually charge ticket prices that cover the cost of doing business and stop treating their passengers like a it's a time-share sales pitch the whole way.
They can't do this most of the time because for most of the year on most routes, supply outstrips demand (i.e., many/most flights on most airlines fly at least a little bit empty, often significantly empty – overall load factors are about 80-85%). They have to charge fares that customers will be willing to pay, even if that means losing money on a given flight. They can only charge profitable fares on the routes and times of year when demand surges (peak routes, holiday periods, major events). They have to keep their network capacity high enough to satisfy the peak demand, but for most of the year and most of the network, demand is lower, so they have to settle for break-even or loss-minimization. (For the record, I co-founded a flight search startup that became a fare optimization platform.)
Was that Flightfox? If so, I loved using it, helped me save so much money but also time :)<p>It sounds like there’s a problem with having too many flights that are barely full and hence unprofitable. AFAIK the federal gov spends significant money subsidising many “small airport” routes even if they’re barely used.
Southwest used to do this, but then somehow got a CEO that burnt it all down instead of raising ticket prices by $20-30.<p>Before them Alaska Air was similar, and is now similarly bad.<p>Having the customers actually own the airline seems like a reasonable approach. The trick is kicking all the assholes off the board, so they can’t fire leadership for treating customers decently while turning a sustainable profit.
Sounds like a good way to lose all your customers to the other airlines that charge less.
Yup, and this is exacerbated by how services like Google Flights work. There's little visibility into any kind of "quality" metric, but prices are always front and center. So why would you optimize based on anything else?
Consumers only look at bottom line. There is basically two markets with airlines, higher end market with credit cards and premium seating; lower end where consumer solely looks at ticket price.
A huge number of businesses survive on whales, it's becoming really apparent. I'm kinda surprised how common it is.<p>I wonder if this will be the next "market" to exploit if ad revenue ever dies down too much, or if it's one that's always been there, and I've simply never been a part of.
They do, it’s just barely enough to cover the cost of doing business and volatility.
They make a lot of money from loyalty programs and credit cards, but the legacy airlines do make money on flying alone. The margin they make on that is razor thin, but they do make money from the core product.<p>Spirit was designed to be ultra low cost, which attracts flyers that are much more price sensitive. Higher Jet A costs means higher ticket prices, which means lost customers, which means lost revenue. Pulling a JetBlue and adding higher tier product offerings to attract the business travelers that _actually_ makes money for airlines would've required an overhaul of their entire business, which they couldn't afford to do.<p>I agree that Spirit will be chopped up by whoever buys them. It happened to Braniff, PanAm, and a whole bunch of other airlines that weren't thrown a lifeline.<p>(JetBlue tried to acquire Spirit to prevent this outcome, but the acquisition didn't pass antitrust. Everyone knew that that acquisiton failing was a death sentence to Spirit, but it was what it was.)
> I agree that Spirit will be chopped up by whoever buys them. It happened to Braniff, PanAm, and a whole bunch of other airlines that weren't thrown a lifeline.<p>But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If the company is worth more to the market and society when sold as pieces, so be it.
> "Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments."<p>If that's the case then how RyanAir survived and is thriving?
It isn't the case. It's a simplistic gloss on a complex finance outcome.<p>Some flights make money.<p>Some flights lose money.<p>Some finance structures make money while looking like losses to acrue tax benefits for other activities.<p>Sometimes the money is being made by holding companies not operating companies. Sometimes the assets are worth more as spares than operating.<p>All companies are complex. I do not think "flights don't make money" is true for all airlines, all flights.
Because people take "airline X makes $50k profit, and makes $55k off of the credit card, so therefore it makes all money from credit cards" which is true from a certain accounting point of view, and also entirely false, in that it's all accounting tricks and the credit card would be worthless without an airline.
Not to mention that loyalty programs and credit card bonuses don't exist in Europe.
This isn't true. European airlines do have loyalty programs with "miles".<p>Air France, British Airways, Finnair, Turkish Airlines, just to name a few, all have miles programs.<p>They just aren't tied to credit cards because the EU caps interchange fees to 0.3%, so there simply isn't enough money to have a meaningful credit card point system.
Because it's nonsense. It's from some YouTube video that went viral a few years ago.
Because their social media strategy is fire
> Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them.<p>I don't get it. Why should they have been turned into utilities? Just because the current iteration loses money?<p>Please be aware that airline pricing is endogenous. That means, it's not set from the outside, but a reaction to market conditions and feeds back into market conditions. Eg airlines might be on the edge of profitability at time X, but when at time Y fuel prices drop a bit (or rise a bit) that doesn't mean that airline will suddenly all make lots of money (or all go bankrupt): the pricing of their product will adjust.<p>That doesn't only go for fuel prices, but also for loyalty programme revenue. If such revenue is available and competition is fierce, then prices will go down until airline can just about stay afloat after taking that extra revenue into account.<p>> Private equity will likely sell the company for parts.<p>You say that like it's a bad thing.
Both Southwest, but also Ryanair are profitable. Totally possible to make money off flights.<p>But you have to follow the same model: use cheaper airports, a single modern aircraft type to simplify operations, high turnaround speed, charge a lot for extras.
Ryanair moves the most passengers of any airline in the world and doesn't have any cobranded credit cards or loyalty program.
Ryanair is 3rd by passengers and 7th by passenger miles, according to this wiki page.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world</a><p>Obviously their model is different to the big American carriers. Perhaps there’s something about the homogeneity of the US domestic market compared to the EU market that favors loyalty based airlines versus budget airlines.
The comments here seem to suggest that the loyalty program funded with credit card margins are to blame for the difference.<p>It suggests we'd be better of eliminating the absurdly high hidden taxes paid to the credit card companies, that in turn act to gamify the business. In the end they raise the cost of doing business, for virtually no benefit at all. It's a monopoly extracting as much wealth they can get away with.<p>The question at the heart of this: How can "the shining light on a hill" be so stupid? It's digging its own demise.
If airlines stopped offering flights then their loyalty programs would not be useful.<p>Even in this "airlines as point program companies" view of the world, flights don't make money in the same way that electricity going into data centers don't make money. It's a place where you have major costs and you want to try and gamify it, but at the end of the day it's pretty necessary for successful operations!<p>Consider why airline points even work as a model in the first place! Airlines have blackout dates and don't offer every seat in a plane for points because _they can make money selling a seat for more than what the points are worth to them_.
> <i>Flights don't make money</i><p>Member-owned co-ops don't need to make money. Structuring an airline as a member-owned co-op is not a fundamentally-stupid idea.
The company is not forced to sell immediately to whoever offers it money, they can sell themselves off for parts.<p>I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.<p>In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.
Spirit's assets are almost entirely their slots at ORD, EWR, LAX and LGA. They don't many of their planes.
Huh? What do you mean? They and Wizz air are public companies. Nothing would stop them from selling their planes etc.
Does this imply that most people who sign up for frequent flier programs end up losing money in the long run, rather than benefitting from them?
> They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago<p>They used to be. Read up on "Civil Aeronautics Board".
Famous Richard Branson quote:<p>"If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."
Sounds like the industry is extremely efficient. Why would we want to turn this into regulated utilities?
Sadly only expensive because the unions bleed the companies dry.
I remember reading about how the major airlines now are more of a "bank that happens to have planes," due to the loyalty programs being worth significantly more than the airline. Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue. [1]<p>I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags. I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty. It is a stupid game that I am forced to play, because the credit cards also provide other benefits, such as fraud protection.<p>I am wondering right now if "Spirit Air 2.0" even has a fighting chance if they are not able to subsidize operating costs by also being a credit card company.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/delta-air-lines-made-8-2-billion-from-your-credit-card-last-year" rel="nofollow">https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/delta-air-lines-m...</a>
>Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue.<p>Just to be clear, that isn't what the article says. It says more than what "most" airlines generate in ticket sales. Not Delta, or any major US carrier. As interesting as that sounds, it couldn't logically make sense and it only represents about 15% of Delta's revenue. It's not even a straightforward revenue stream, it works for profitability because they are able to book most of the revenue immediately and able to mark down the future expense because of how loyalty rewards are obligated.
This isn't really a bad thing. Any company that monetizes credit cards can only do so because of their real, core product. They aren't really just banks like people claim. If they didn't fly people places reliably the whole thing collapses.<p>It's really just a surprising morph of their economic model in the post regulation era.
> It is a stupid game that I am forced to play<p>You are not forced to play it. That is a just story you tell yourself. You can make a different choice.
> I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty.<p>Generally it's the interchange fees that fund reward programs (charged between banks), not the merchant fee.<p><a href="https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/interchange-fees-101-what-they-are-how-they-work-and-how-to-cut-costs#:~:text=Issuing%20banks%20often%20use%20interchange%20fees%20to%20fund%20reward%20programmes." rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/interchange-fees-101-wh...</a>
> I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags.<p>That's a reason to have an airline credit card, it's not a reason to use it (other than for purchasing that airline's tickets)
This loyalty program is the business is oversold imo, done to death by every content creator. It's the data, the data blah blah<p>The $8.2billion from American express pays basically is buying tickets and ticket extra, it buys them some points, lets ignore multiples for now, it buys them 8.2billion points, which they give to customers which then buys tickets.<p>If Spirit accepts USDC instead it wouldn't be that much different.
I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.<p>Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.<p>Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.<p>I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.<p>I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.
>I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.<p>Yeah it's not a secret that you can get by in life on the cheap if you have cheap, trashy tastes.
Spirit seemed to enjoy making their customers hate them. everyone who liked Spirit had to explain themselves (like you did) because their reputation was awful. It was a trainwreck of a brand.
The only bad experience I ever had on Spirit was from their garbage passengers, never had a problem with the airline itself, flew them probably 20 times. But then again anecdotal evidence is also garbage, so who knows, maybe we were just lucky. Or maybe a vocal minority made it sound worse than it was.
They did things differently compared to other airlines, so it does warrant an explanation. People pay for the cheapest flight, and expect things like free bag checkin. Other airlines will charge everyone more, even if you had no bags and provide free bag checkin. I've had flights where I only had a small backpack and nothing more, I don't want to the "priced in" fee assuming everyone will check a bag. Spirit gave you exactly what you paid for, which is how it should be. No marketing mind games to trick you into thinking you're getting some luxury service. Even in first class most domestic airlines provide a subpar experience, might as well be for a good value like Spirit did. International flights are different though, and the bar is much higher there due to length of flights.
The reason people hated spirit was the same reason they flew spirit, it was cheap.
loved Spirit and flew with them 8 different round trips from BWI to many destinations. So cheap (clothes in bookbag) and never had an issue. They will be missed!
My friends used to joke that it was like flying in a tin can, or that the wheels would fall off mid-flight. The jokes were endless.<p>I liked Spirit, though, great cost savings, and I didn't mind the minor inconveniences that came with it.<p>Aside from being known for being a cheap airline, the brand itself was pretty solid... I think it had everything working to its advantage. The bright yellow exteriors of the planes, a catchy name. I think people knew exactly what Spirit was and what they offered, which is the sign of a good brand.
the "temu" of airlines if you will<p>wait a minute... what if?
Agreed. I make decent money as a software engineer but I've probably flow 50+ times with Spirit. Like you said, they are predictable and reliable. What I appreciated about their staff is that they were extremely friendly but also capable of putting entitled people in their place. Oftentimes on AA and United, assholes got their way but on Spirit, they squashed it fast.<p>The only people surprised by Spirit were people who don't read warning labels and then you should only be surprised once. Heck, I paid 3$ for coffee on spirit but they would gladly bring refills and were proactive about almost like a restaurant. On AA and United, you usually had to go up and ask.<p>On top of that, you could get the big front seat (tm) which wasn't first class but pretty good about 150$ if you waited until your flight to bid. I got it a bunch and it came with free snacks and drinks and it was much cheaper than buying business<p>I'm gonna miss it.
> With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably<p>Talk about damning with faint praise
American Airlines has actually had terrible customer ratings for some time (and I agree, they can be awful).<p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/american-airlines-worst-airline-country-163141967.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/american-airlines-worst-...</a>
> The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.<p>Noble, but this will fail. Why would anyone do this? No incentive.<p>These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business. You might as well get more pledges given that you'd have more control and the same profit share. It will regress to the same as the status quo.
I pledged $1,000. I have been daydreaming about a customer-owned airline for years now, just about every time I walk through an airport. This might not have much chance of succeeding in its purchase of Spirit’s assets, but I’d love to watch things unfold if it did.<p>> These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business.<p>For most businesses the size of Spirit Airlines, the owners typically do not operate the business. They pay people to do that. I don’t operate REI, even though I’m one of its many owners.
Thank you. There's a lot of criticism and skepticism here, and it's nice to see an optimistic comment.<p>I've no idea if the proponents of this plan are reputable, but the concept reminds me of the early years of WestJet, when they made a big fuss about being employee owned and had (back then) a markedly better customer experience. For US residents reading this, I'm told they were a bit like Southwest Airlines.<p>Even if the naysayers are correct and the probability of this panning out is low, you'll never hit the pitches you don't swing at, right?
aren't there plenty of state owned airlines?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airli...</a>
wow, it's almost like you will become... a shareholder?
I'm not sure that's even noble as by buying you would be a shareholder...
Yes. Reminds me of the “anarchists” that don’t realise that they just want to recreate the government but with their people in charge.
co-op: one member, one vote. members elect leadership with standard term limits. emphasis on services, price and patron returns. dividend according to use not capital investment. members have direct engagement in financials.
public companies: votes scale with shares. large institutional investors and other large share holders have most say in leadership. emphasis on "shareholder value" (eg extractive value). dividends according to shares. shareholders have only limited visibility into finances.
they're very different, concluding otherwise is misguided
Co-ops don't exist at all, right?
Few people know this, but Desjardins, a Canadian financial service cooperative, is hugely popular in the province of Quebec (and also Ontario), and has close to CAD $400 billions in total assets.
I wouldn't say they are common.<p>MEC was the only co-op I have ever been part of. I'm pretty sure they stopped being a co-op and sold it to private equity.
For the Americans in the audience: MEC ~ Canadian REI.<p>See perhaps: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative</a>
Vanguard is "kind of" like a co-op, in that it is owned by its mutual funds which are owned by its customers.<p>Fidelity is still better in some metrics, however.
I dont know of any with such high capex
This is a really interesting thing, both from an ownership structure perspective and from a "there is nuance in the details" perspective. I did a bit of a deep dive into this a few years ago when there was a local refinery strike. The refinery is a co-op and is also part of a larger co-op system.<p>I'll lay out the specifics here from what I learned. I'm not convinced either way, yet, that it could work for an airline.<p>So here's the ownership structure:<p>- Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC) - produces fuel<p>- Federated Co-operatives (FCL) - owns the refinery, also owns food and agriculture distribution warehouses, negotiates bulk pricing<p>- 200-ish independent regional Co-ops jointly own FCL<p>The CRC is highly profitable. FCL is profitable. The independent regional co-ops are not, on their own, all individually profitable. Some of these exist in small rural centres, some of them exist in larger cities. The urban ones are generally profitable, the smaller ones not so much. The rural ones, though, are largely the lifebloods of their communities; it's not unusual for the Co-op Grocery Store and Co-op Gas Station to be the only sources of food and fuel for miles and miles. While these do sometimes run at a loss, they make up for it with their annual Patronage cheques from FCL: when the CRC makes a profit and when FCL makes a profit (from the CRC and from their distribution network), those profits get returned back to the member co-ops on a pro rata basis: buy more from FCL, get more at the end of the year.<p>At the far tail end, each of these independent co-ops is a member-owned co-op. At the end of the year <i>I</i> end up getting a patronage cheque based on how much fuel, food, and building supplies I bought that year. It's not large, but getting a $100 cheque in the mail is always nice :).<p>In this situation, though, it all works because the not-so-profitable pieces own both their upstream wholesalers and a crazy-profitable refinery. (The refinery sells to other customers outside of FCL as well).<p>One of the other critical pieces that the strike/lockout/overall "labour dispute" really made clear to everyone: the independent Co-ops, FCL, and the upstream CRC are all <i>member-owned co-ops</i>, not <i>worker-owned co-ops</i>.<p>---<p>So let's look at how an airline co-op might be structured. The first parallel that I could see would be flipping the regional airline model on its head; currently the big players like Delta and United run a bunch of their smaller routes through regionals (SkyWest, Republic, etc). If a bunch of them got together, they could in theory jointly one one of the majors. The wrinkle there, as others have pointed out, the majors aren't profitable <i>as airlines</i>, but rather through their credit cards and loyalty programs. Alternative, then? Do a bunch of regionals get together and buy a bank? Let the bank be profitable, let the major airline handle traffic between the regional hubs?<p>I know quite a bit less about worker-owned co-ops, but generally speaking aviation is incredibly capital intensive. Starting a worker-owned co-op airline is probably not possible. A single, say, 737 Max 8 costs $121M. That capital's gotta come from somewhere.
“The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.”<p>Like, all people in the world?<p>Customers? Employees?<p>What does this mean?<p>EDIT: It’s shareholders, but each person has one vote regardless of share count.
The real solution should be a massive intercity bullet train program that connects major transit hubs, like the interstate highway buildout. The massive infrastructure spend would kickstart the US economy and provide thousands of jobs.
Sounds good if you live on the East Coast.<p>Even with Japanese level high speed rail NYC to LA still takes much much longer than flying.<p>You need to buy land. Disrupt wildlife, and various ecosystems.<p>The government should of bailed out Spirit instead. They served a public good.<p>Allowing lower to middle income people to travel helps everyone.
Trains have been proven to be able to go at least 375mph [0]. That would make NYC->SF take 6.9 hours to travel the 4162 km. The current average flight time from NYC to SF is 6.7 hours.<p>So, it's at least technically possible.<p>China is doing R&D on a partial-vacuum train (basically Musk's hyperloop thing) with a target of 1,243 mph[1]. That's probably a pipe dream, but worth mentioning nonetheless.<p>> The government should of [sic] bailed out Spirit instead.<p>I'd be okay with this if all the taxpayers were granted equal shares that their collective money could have purchased at an imputed no-bailout price.<p>0: L0 Series SCMaglev<p>1: T-Flight train
Why do people want to generate jobs? I'd rather generate a jobless utopia where we all do art.
Random side note. Why do many of these (presumably) LLM stamped out sites have the same aesthetic where they all need a pulsating indicator at the top as if to indicate some sort of urgency aesthetic?
assuming it's an llm site, the implication here is some action needs to be taken before private equity buys it for scraps (inferred from the homepage copy)<p>whether it's an llm, a template or bespoke made from bytecode doesn't really matter does it?
Or the thing where they have a bombastic display of numbers, rehashing either emphatically trivial information, or information presented elsewhere, as if they’re the most important figures in the universe. e.g.<p>> *0* hedge fund owners. Zero<p>or including the date Spirit collapsed (despite already mentioning it earlier on the page!). Why not also include “*6* letters in ‘Spirit’” while you’re at it?
But without a sense of urgency the marks might stop to think first.
I get the idea but this seems very much something not credible, like who's behind it, what are the guarantees, etc.
It seems to be an Instagram user: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/spiritair2.0/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/spiritair2.0/</a> and his own account is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hitherehunter/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/hitherehunter/</a>
LLMs make time-sensitive frauds easier and faster to stand up to take money from idiots.<p>I'm surprised they don't also include a team page with a bunch of ChatGPT-generated photographs of fresh-faced fake people to really sell it.
Sorry, why would I invest in a failed airline with an anonymous collective with no defined leadership?<p>How could it do anything but fail?
Maybe it is better to let the airline that treats people like adversarial cattle to die; maybe it is a good signal that that is a bad business model.
A similar large scale success in India decades ago:-
AMUL is an Indian multinational dairy cooperative, founded on 19 December 1946. With a turnover of US$6.2 billion (2022) and 3.6 million farmer-members, it is the world's largest dairy cooperative and a household name for milk and milk products across India.<p>The cooperative was born out of exploitation: farmers in Kheda, Gujarat, were forced to supply milk to Polson Dairy, which held a monopoly and paid farmers unfairly through commission-taking agents.<p>AMUL returns 85% of every rupee earned back to farmers — far above the global average of 33% — and procures milk at rates 15–20% higher than private dairies.<p>AMUL's democratic governance ensures farmers elect board members who represent their interests, and the Managing Director of each unit is appointed by this farmer-led board — not the state government — preventing political interference and corruption.<p>AMUL demonstrates how a business can achieve large-scale commercial success while prioritising social justice and environmental care — through collective ownership, democratic governance, equitable profit-sharing, and community investment — offering a powerful model for cooperatives worldwide.
> <i>The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.</i><p>To be clear, the proposed Spirit Air 2.0 would also be answerable to shareholders. A structural difference is that each shareholder would have one vote regardless of capital contribution. But the real substantive difference is the <i>spirit</i> of what they’re fighting for: worker ownership, affordable fares, transparent operations, no golden parachutes, <i>etc.</i>
I am not sure what the site intends to do, but doesn’t spirit have eight billion in debt with about one billion in payments due immediately.
The planes and other assets belong to the debt holders. Unless this site plans to raise a couple of billion, I don’t think they are buying any airline .
Let's see the pool's at $88M with $670 average buy-in, so each of the 132k buyers will owe $15,000-$60,000 of outstanding debt so they can support solvency and to keep airline prices down, and become buyers in the not particularly exciting and highly regulated, volatile capex and opex expensive, fuel consuming and definitely not particularly environmentally friendly, with much larger competitors passenger air transport industry. What an opportunity!
Awesome, I hope we see a lot more of this. Co-ops do work, REI is one, Modo is another and we could have many more. Over and over again companies are slowly destroyed by extractive shareholders or PE firms, the current structure of a public company is not the only possible shape.
<a href="https://youtu.be/GbIimta-TJs?si=3Sm-Dgl8DtfubFSt" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/GbIimta-TJs?si=3Sm-Dgl8DtfubFSt</a><p>A period documentary about the Meridian Triumph motorcycles co op. Sad, thoughtful take on a particular bit of British manufacturing history. That the co op started with a strike, had to trade exclusively with a single customer, and that the senior workers became the managers they hated.<p>Due to the structure of that co op there was no way for them to access the capital they needed to redevelop their products and it ended up in private hands as a result, leaving the workers with nothing. I don’t think I would wish a co op on anybody.
Thanks I will watch it, looks interesting. But i would say there's also a million documentaries, movies, news reports, examples and more about insane, evil, stupid shit that goes on in various corporations or how organizations turn to shit when acquired by PE as well. We know for example that cigarette companies knew their products caused cancer and other health problems for decades(!) while denying it publicly, and this is the bar regulators expect today - that they will do absolutely anything including letting people die through smoking or pollution or blocking access to healthcare to make a profit. So a co-op going poorly doesn't invalidate the concept.
Average pledge size is $666 (from 40k pledges). That strikes me as a lot. And obviously cursed.
Seems like an interesting idea. Wish I could get some more information on who is behind this website for credibility purposes
> PROPOSED ONLY: Profit shares would scale with pledge amount under the proposed structure. This is not a confirmed financial instrument. Nothing here constitutes an offer of securities.<p>There's no way they could get away with something significantly different, right? Like anything else they'd just be liable for being sued?
I'm wondering why an airline like Ryan Air (which is similar in spirit to Spirit Air) didn't buy them out ...?
I have a pitch to buy American Spirits and American airlines to bring back smoking on airplanes. I would be happy to pivot to purchasing Spirit Air.<p><a href="https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/InhaleLabs_PitchDeck.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/InhaleLabs_PitchDeck.pdf</a>
Can someone help me understand the argument that the FTC blocking the merger was bad?<p>The argument I have seen is that blocking it resulted in Spirit dying and people losing their jobs and there being less competition.<p>Wouldn’t the same exact thing have happened regardless? Am i supposed to believe that Jet Blue would have kept all of those employees? There would be one less competitor anyway, and in the merger case they’re even more powerful now meaning competing is harder.<p>It seems to me it’s just that creditors want to be paid out by a merger rather than paid our for cents on the dollar when it died on it’s own.
JetBlue is a small rival (JetBlue at ~5% of US traffic, Spirit at ~3%) to the big 4 United/American/Southwest/Delta (each with ~17%). At least on the surface, a larger JetBlue might be more competitive rather than forcing them into the unequal partnerships like they have with United at the moment.
Certainly, some jobs would be lost, but I do think that Spirit dying is a worse outcome than joining another small airline.
A merger would be more orderly, especially if overall capacity only needed to go down by <i>part</i> of what's in the chunk being cut out.
The straw that broke the camel's back is the fuel spike due to the Iran War. That drained the remaining liquidity.<p>No idea if the extra time "normal" fuel prices would have allowed Spirit to find a way to stay afloat, but the fuel price spike stole any time they had to figure it out.
I was okay with most of the skimping with spirit airways, but what really annoyed me was their delays. I can plan ahead not to bring luggage and to sit cramped. But arriving at my destination 5 hours later was a deal breaker for me. I don't know if there are statistics for how delayed they are vs competitors, but after my second flight with them, I decided to fly with airlines that are more punctual.
Looks like Spirit is #5 out of 21 for most on-time flights, so, top 20%.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1psiwws/us_airlines_ranked_from_best_to_worst_for_ontime/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1psiwws/us_airlines...</a>
“It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt”<p>Bullhockey. Wall Street doesn’t assign debt. Poor management and bad risk-assessment leads to assuming bad debt.<p>This is like saying it’s the car’s fault that you drove to work today…
Tangential. If you're interested in the history of airlines and the intense power struggles, I highly recommend the book Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines Into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr.
If the employees bought it, it would probably make more sense. Random people don't seem invested enough.
This REEKS of /r/wallstreetbets manipulation... I vote to remove it entirely.<p>Nobody is buying spirit air... a bunch of gamblers just want to pump the price monday morning.
This is reminiscent of the CHAZ takeover in Seattle when the protesters planted like 4 potatoes in a urine-soaked park and called it "the People's Garden" or whatever.<p>Spirit was an objectively terrible airline. Their business model failed. They folded. The end. This is why you can't fly Braniff or Southern Airways anymore in 2026. Failed businesses go under, they don't live on in perpetuity.
Feels scammy… that’s all I’ve got to say.
We are just not a serious country anymore are we
It's a lot simpler. They were providing cheapest service in the era when almost 50% of spending is from top 10% consumers. Inequality made no-frills model unprofitable, no airline without a good premium product and good public image is viable today.
Spirit was killed by illegal predatory pricing!! There's no reason the corporate criminals who do this stuff would go easy on competition run by different people. The answer is anti-trust enforcement (and related enforcing of the law) and much stronger regulation of businesses in general (if not outright public/government airlines)<p><a href="https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/who-killed-spirit-airlines" rel="nofollow">https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/who-killed-spirit-airline...</a>
why not just start your own airline instead of buying one that is dysfunctional and losing money
because airplanes, routes, employees, pilots etc arent exactly easy to come by without a whole lot more time and capital expenditure
> if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable.<p>- Warren Buffett (Comedian)
Hear me out: A Waffle House in every Spirit Airline gate.
The orange king is incompetent on just about every level, save for his cronies pocketing away money into private pockets. You have to ask the people who voted for him why they support this.
Looks like well-worded scam.
Let’s throw good money after bad!!!<p>Brilliant.
It’s kinda dumb. They don’t own any planes, and buying the spirit name means the bank/hesge fund gets paid because that’s probably the most valuable piece of property spirit has.<p>The employees are all gone and shuttered, even if you go try to rehire them they are all jumping to any other company if they stayed to the end. The pilots and cabin crew lost seniority and you won’t be able to afford ALPA union pay or AFA pay.<p>So while they somehow raised 26 million, it feels like a hollow gesture so that the creditors get paid but not really be realized into an actual airline with an AOC<p>At 26 million raised it’s actually better to make a new airline and run it lean. Get a good route or two and it could work, but 26 million is lean but doable. The liquidators want to get spirt planes released asap.
They haven’t raised a cent. They’re asking for pledges, not actual cash contributions.
It would be simpler to contract with Spirit Halloween to start a new airline.
> <i>Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could.</i><p>It saddens me that people will buy into this mindless populist drivel.
We can barely make an mmo with a bunch of kickstarters who threw in 50 bucks 5 years ago complaining about “the excessive money they laid out” squeaky wheeling the games to death, this is going to be even worse.<p>Great idea in theory but…
Kinda sketchy that all of the base stats are hardcoded in the JS (foundingPatrons is 36605, totalPledged is 22816377). Then it fetches some "live" stats and adds values to that.
Please be sure to start a second site that raises money to bail out the first site.
I wonder how much money I could get from starting a Kickstarter to attempt to* buy up as much of Spirit as possible.<p>*and fail to
This, um, seems kinda sus. An obvious AI-generated site trying to raise money for something implausible?
I'm not American and I've never flown Spirit Air so can someone explain where all the loyalty to this airline is coming from? Like isn't this another big corp biting the dust?
I could fly from the middle of the USA to Orlando round trip for $90 if I just packed a backpack. Unbeatable value, that’s cheap enough for a spur of the moment weekend trip for the whole family.
They had affordable flights between places like LA and Vegas / Florida and Cancún so it became almost like a bus route for some people.
It had good departure times both mornings and evenings.<p>And it was cheap, so you could book a next day flight without paying multiples in premium.<p>It was fun and affordable to fly out of state in the morning, spend a day exploring another place and get back at night.
For clarity, absolutely nobody did or does this. Spirit is bottom of the barrel cheap - it made flying accessible for many people, who otherwise would not fly (think Ryan air). Absolutely nobody was interstate day tripping, especially on spirt, besides this poster.
Not sure, maybe people like the underdog or just like the business model, you pay for what you get. I flew them a couple times and it wasn't great.
It and Frontier were the only affordable airlines.
No, it’s a small corp biting the dust.
I am American and it baffles me as well. Spirit was one of the worst possible choices for flying, where every little thing was an upcharge. Why people willingly submitted to that insanity I will never understand.
If business people couldn't run it as a business, what hope do a bunch of random fools on the internet have?<p>Plus, it's a carbon-polluting business that props up dirty, corrupt petrochem industries and regimes.<p>Let it die.
I was looking into Spirit's bankruptcy(s) and it's really fascinating.<p>One of the creditors that piloted their exit from the first bankruptcy also provided on $80M out of a $270M line of credit secured by assets Spirit needed to survive (an RCF was backed by their right to take-off and land at LGA amoungst other thinfs)<p>1 week before the 2nd bankruptcy, Spirit drew against the entirety of that line of credit.<p>During the 2nd bankruptcy, besides rolling large amounts the debt owed to them from the 1st bankruptcy (so Spirit would need to pay it back before other creditors), they had the proceeds of plane sales go towards... interest payments on their RCF and paying back <i>additional</i> financing from the 2nd bankruptcy.<p>The creditors leading the 2nd bankruptcy also sold the lease to Spirit's largest hangar on April 2nd, but did a similar thing again: instead of the cash going towards operations, it went to the creditors who'd led both bankruptcies.<p>-<p>Seeing as they refused the government's bailout, I'm guessing this is doomed as well, but interesting stuff for a non-finance person
letsnotandsaywedid.net
This is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve seen on the internet in years!
So many airline crashes were traced back to “poor company culture” by NTSB that I would never consider flying a company owned by random internet people. Having someone with a lot to lose in charge of things is a feature.
Let’s not.
There's a crucial flaw in the dishonest "story" on this little web page of the Green Bay Packers being owned by the public: that "stock" is just a novelty piece of paper that carries no entitlement to a equity in a company.<p>When the Packers upgrade their stadium and charge higher prices for tickets, I can promise you that they won't use the profits to buy back your shares or pay you a dividend.
i got 5 on it
LOL. Will this be the first AI-slop to earn an SEC investigation?
The "Butthurt" airline, where you fly once remember for a life time. I still remember how much my ass hurt sitting in their seats, and it's been a decade.
This isn't really a scam because no money moves and this is non-binding. Here are a list of glaring issues I see here:<p>1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.<p>2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?<p>3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!<p>4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.<p>5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.<p>6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.<p>7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!<p>8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.<p>9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._<p>10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.<p>11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.<p>12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?<p>13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.<p>14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.<p>15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.<p>16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).<p>17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.
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