Spirit Airlines turned off the lights for good Saturday morning.
The budget airline had lost billions of dollars in recent years, filing for bankruptcy in 2024 and 2025. Spirit hoped to emerge from its second bankruptcy this summer as a smaller company, but those plans fell apart as fuel prices rose in recent weeks.
As Spirit’s fate became clear, the Trump administration offered a $500 million federal lifeline, but the airline’s investors and government officials could not reach an agreement on how to structure a deal to save the company.
In a letter on Thursday to Spirit, the airline’s creditors said they did not see how the company could survive and urged Spirit’s board to begin winding down its business, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.
Spirit reshaped aviation in the United States in recent decades through a business model based on keeping costs very low and offering customers cheap tickets. The approach served Spirit well for years, generating huge profits, but competition from larger airlines and rising costs hobbled the company. It also suffered from engine problems and other problems.
Spirit was founded in Michigan in the 1960s as a trucking company. In the 1990s, it started offering charter flights. Then, in the next decade, it started upending the airline business.
In 2006, Indigo Partners, a private equity fund that specializes in budget airlines, acquired a majority stake in Spirit. The airline adopted the business model made famous by Ryanair, the European carrier, and focused on reducing costs, selling cheap tickets and offering bare-bones services. The industry calls airlines that use that business model “ultra-low-cost carriers” to distinguish them from an earlier generation of low-cost carriers like Southwest Airlines.
One of the main proponents of that strategy was Ben Baldanza, who spent a decade as Spirit’s chief executive. During his tenure, the airline generated big profits. Mr. Baldanza, who died in 2024, was proud of Spirit’s no-frills approach, which the airline highlighted in sometimes provocative advertising.
Spirit became the subject of jokes on late-night talk shows and frustrated many travelers by charging fees for services that other airlines provided for free, such as printed boarding passes and the ability to choose a seat. But Spirit’s approach worked. The airline attracted many customers and forced other airlines to make big changes.
Experts in aviation and economics say Spirit helped to make air travel accessible to more people with its low fares. Its decision to fly at an airport often prompted other companies operating there to quickly lower prices. That was one of the main reasons that a federal judge sided with the Biden administration’s Justice Department in blocking Spirit’s plan to merge with JetBlue Airways in 2024.
“In eliminating Spirit from the marketplace, the proposed transaction would, by definition, dampen Spirit’s disruptive force,” the judge, William G. Young, wrote in his ruling.
Some have criticized the Biden administration for thwarting the merger. But JetBlue has also struggled to turn a profit for years, and aviation experts say there is no guarantee that a combination of the two airlines would have been profitable. Airline mergers are hard to pull off well and are often marred by severe problems.
As Spirit grew, it expanded into airports served by major airlines, which, in turn, adopted some of Spirit’s tactics to compete with it.
In 2012, Delta Air Lines introduced lower but restrictive “basic economy” fares that were in the same ballpark as the fares that Spirit and other budget airlines offered. Later, United Airlines and American Airlines rolled out similar basic tickets.
As a result, many people who previously flew on Spirit began to book tickets on larger airlines, which could also lure them with more frequent service and shorter waits between connecting flights.
Niraj Chokshi is a Times reporter who writes about aviation, rail and other transportation industries.
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