Episode Details

Source: “Flying the unfriendly skies: A business ethicist says goodbye to Spirit Airlines,” by John Paul Rollert, Fast Company, May 12, 2026.

By noon on May 2, 2026, the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia was almost silent.

Cibo Express closed half a day early. There were no customers to serve. The last TSA officer was sent home. Spirit Airlines, which had flown out of that Art Deco terminal — the one built in 1940 for Pan Am’s Clippers — was over. By dawn that morning, the website read: To our Guests: all flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available.

Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs that weekend. Five thousand flight attendants. Pilots. Mechanics. Dispatchers. Ground crews. The union of flight attendants asked the federal government for a $600 weekly supplement, because the airline they had worked for could not be relied upon to pay them what it already owed.

At the bankruptcy hearing on Tuesday, the company’s attorney offered the official cause of death. A fuel “megaspike,” he said, driven by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, projected to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the year’s liquidity needs. The HR letter from Vice President Suzanne Solon explained that the company could not give workers more notice because notice itself would have killed the rescue capital they were still trying to raise.

This is the airline’s story of its own death. It is the story you will read in most places. It is not the truth.

A healthy airline survives fuel spikes. They happen every cycle. American, United, Southwest, and Delta are flying through the same Iran war, the same fuel chart, the same year. None of them hedge fuel either. Spirit hadn’t hedged since 2015 — and neither has anyone else at scale.

The difference isn’t hedging. The difference is what the other airlines had that Spirit did not: reserves of every other kind. Balance sheet cushion. Creditor goodwill. Passenger loyalty that could be monetized in a crunch. Union flexibility that could buy time. Operational slack that could absorb shock. Spirit had stripped all of them out, and called the stripping discipline.

Spirit’s own restructuring plan, filed weeks before the shutdown, assumed jet fuel at $2.24 a gallon for 2026. By the end of April, the price was $4.51. The forensic firm Santiago & Company calls this an “optionality failure” — efficiency without reserves, a structure with no slack. Every dollar of fuel cost above plan translated to $109M in cash pressure. The company tried to raise $500M in rescue capital. No one came.

No one came because no one was left to come.

Not the passengers, who had been treated as fees-to-be-extracted for fifteen years. Not the employees, whose interactions had been scripted by the Disney Institute in 2017 because Spirit understood — correctly — that the frontline mattered, but understood — incorrectly — that the answer was to train the smile rather than deploy the judgment. Not the creditors, who had watched the model and knew there was nothing left in the tank to lend against. Not the regulators, not the unions, not the public.

This is what extraction does over time. It strips the relational reserves a business needs to survive a normal industry event.

Ben Baldanza, who ran Spirit from 2005 to 2016 and died of ALS in 2024, called what he built a “bus with wings.” He was proud of the phrase. The Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy committee, awarding him in 2024, said the model created “an avenue for middle-class and working-class Americans to fly to leisure destinations.” Both descriptions are true. Neither is complete.

What Baldanza built — and what the University of Chicago business ethicist John Paul Rollert has been documenting for eleven years — was a system designed to identify every dignity that could be unbundled, priced, and resold. Snacks. Seat choice. Carry-on bags. Boarding order. Water. The bare fare wa