Political blame game begins and passengers left adrift after Spirit ceases operations

US airlines and government officials battled on Saturday to deal with stranded passengers and stricken employees after discount carrier Spirit Airlines abruptly ceased operations – and a political and business blame game got under way over the collapse of the low-cost carrier.

“If you have a flight scheduled with Spirit Airlines, don’t show up at the airport; there will be no one here to assist you,” the US secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, warned at a press conference after laying out measures for customers booked with the Florida-based company to obtain refunds or find discounted flights on other airlines.

Spirit’s airport check-in desks sat empty across the country on Saturday after the company went out of business in the early hours, posting on its website that after 34 years of flying it had “started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately”.

At the Orlando international airport overnight, a digital departure display sign was filled with bright red notifications of canceled Spirit flights.

There were no more Spirit planes in the air, with their distinctive bright yellow paint, after the last flight landed in Dallas, Texas, after midnight and Spirit’s management announced it was the end, after talks for a government rescue failed.

The Spirit president and CEO, Dave Davis, told the Wall Street Journal that it had not been his intention for the airline to leave travelers with bookings out on a limb.

“We didn’t intentionally sell any tickets thinking we weren’t going to be here,” he said. “We thought we were going to get the liquidity we needed.”

But plans were upended. Traveler Angela Moreno told NBC News that she was booked to fly from Fort Lauderdale in Florida to Nashville, Tennessee, for a wedding.

“The whole family is going there from different states, so it’s very shocking,” she told the TV news outlet. “There’s many people who cannot attend the wedding as of now.” With tickets on competing airlines priced at $600, she said it was unlikely she’d make it, adding: “I hope the best for those people who really needed that flight.”

On social media platforms, where travelers often go to vent about delayed or canceled flights, many sent nostalgic posts.

“Goodbye SpiritAirlines. Those of us in the ‘D’ (Detroit), or previously known as your Second Hub of #DTW, will miss ya,” said @IUTruthtellers2 on X. Others posted nostalgic stories and added“RIP”.

“They truly were one of the last cheap ‘get me there as fast and cheap as possible’ options,” Reddit user AioliUpset7805 wrote on a thread, adding: “I’ll miss them.”

A political blame game erupted. Duffy said that the war in Iran, which has almost doubled the price of jet fuel, wasn’t to blame for Spirit’s collapse and that the company was “in dire straits long before the war with Iran”.

“Multiple times they had filed for bankruptcy. Their model wasn’t working,” he added. “They couldn’t get the fiscal health.”

Republican fingers pointed at the Biden administration, which opposed a $3.8bn sale of Spirit to JetBlue, citing a risk of higher airfares, with a federal court in 2024 blocking the takeover.

“Biden took the unprecedented step of using the Dept of Transportation AND the DOJ to block a merger of JetBlue and faltering Spirit,” the Republican Kentucky representative Thomas Massie posted on X. “That block and high fuel prices have led to Spirit’s demise.”

The Democratic US senator Elizabeth Warren countered, saying: “Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline … Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families.”

Her post on X also said: “FWIW [for what it’s worth], JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal.”

Meanwhile, Duffy scorned Democrats whom he cited for hailing the interventions in the deal as a “victory for US travelers”.

“Thank a Democrat,” Duffy posted on X. “Joe Biden and [then transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg bragged about blocking the JetBlue–Spirit merger … The very deal that could have saved Spirit Airlines. The result: Less competition, customers scrambling, employees losing jobs. You can’t make this stuff up.”

Talks to bail out the company stalled last week when creditors including Ken Griffin’s Citadel LLC, Ares Management Corp and Cyrus Capital opposed a government plan to take 90% of the company in exchange for a $500m bailout, reported CBS News.

The lenders made a counterproposal but no agreement resulted. The creditors said in a letter seen by the New York Times that they did not see how the airline could survive and urged its board to wind it down.

Duffy added on Saturday that there was potential for a deal with the government, but “it had to be a good deal,” and the talks’ failure was down to “a creditor issue”.

“Again, they have the final say of whether they want to do a deal with the government,” Duffy said. “But also from the government’s perspective, we oftentimes don’t have a half a billion dollars laying around in a spare account that we can put into a bailout of an airline. So there was creative thinking on how it could happen. Those two things never materialized.”

Spirit operated throughout the US, Latin America and the Caribbean, after being founded in 1983 in Detroit as Charter One Airlines.

The historic Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport was Spirit’s hub in New York and on Saturday the small art deco building was a ghost town. A notice on the door declared the airline was no more and passengers who had shown up that morning hoping to catch a last flight had been turned away.

“I can only imagine how many millions of families [there are] out there where vacations are now out of reach,” Reddit user BigBubby305 said, adding that the price difference between Spirit and carriers such as Delta and American Airlines was, at times, more than $1,000 for a set of tickets for their family.

A Reddit user who said they were a Spirit pilot out of Las Vegas, posted: “I always took great pride in knowing we were saving people money and allowing those to travel who couldn’t afford to otherwise … To shut down forever tonight has been one of the saddest experiences of my life.”

Spirit had around 4,000 domestic flights scheduled through 15 May, according to the aviation data analytics firm Cirium.

*Reuters contributed reporting*