Spirit Airlines abruptly stopped flying in the early hours of Saturday, posting on its website that after 34 years in the air it had started an orderly wind-down of operations, effective immediately. Its last flight landed in Dallas, Texas, after midnight, and passengers booked on the carrier were left adrift as the airline went out of business.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned travelers not to head to the airport if they had Spirit flights scheduled. “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,” he said, adding that measures were being laid out for customers to get refunds or find discounted seats on other airlines.
The shutdown was visible across the country on Saturday. Spirit’s airport check-in desks sat empty, and at Orlando international airport a departure screen flashed bright red cancellations for Spirit flights overnight. The collapse came after management said talks for a government rescue failed, ending an airline that had been struggling for years and had filed for bankruptcy multiple times, according to Duffy.
Spirit chief executive Dave Davis said the company did not sell tickets while expecting to vanish. “We didn’t intentionally sell any tickets thinking we weren’t going to be here,” he told the, adding that Spirit believed “we were going to get the liquidity we needed.” That explanation cuts against the raw experience of stranded passengers, some of whom had already paid for trips and were now trying to figure out how to get home.
The airline’s downfall also pulled a political fight back into view. Republicans blamed the Biden administration for blocking Spirit’s $3.8 billion sale to JetBlue in 2024, arguing the opposition deprived the carrier of a lifeline. Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie posted on X that Biden had taken “the unprecedented step of using the Dept of Transportation AND the DOJ to block a merger of JetBlue and faltering Spirit.” A federal court also blocked the takeover that year.
Duffy pushed back on suggestions that the collapse was driven by the war in Iran and rising fuel prices, saying Spirit was already “in dire straits long before the war with Iran.” He said the airline was “multiple times” in bankruptcy territory and that “their model wasn’t working” because they “couldn’t get the fiscal health.” With Spirit now shut down and refund plans being drawn up, the immediate question is not how the airline survived, but how quickly its stranded customers can be made whole.