Moe Haas knew the worst could happen when the county airport authority announced his promotion with a yellow Spirit Airlines cake.
For years, Arnold Palmer Regional Airport had depended on Spirit to run all of its flights out of Latrobe, a small town about an hour east of Pittsburgh. But now the airline was in deep financial trouble.
Still, Haas was hopeful when he took over as executive a week ago. The airport had just launched a nonstop service to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and soon, it would open a new $22 million terminal, a feat that would double the number of passengers it could serve.
Then, on Saturday, three days after Haas took over, one of his workers texted at 3 a.m. that Spirit had begun “an orderly wind-down” of its business. Every flight was canceled. Arnold Palmer Regional Airport was, for commercial passengers, all of a sudden defunct.
Across the nation, Spirit customers scrambled to rebook their flights on United and JetBlue, but as Haas drove to Arnold Palmer several hours before dawn, he knew that his town, and his employees, would have no other options. The airport still had private planes and chartered flights, but Spirit was its only commercial carrier. Other airports lost just a percentage of their flights. Arnold Palmer was the only one in the entire country to lose 100 percent of its commercial traffic. Without Spirit, Haas knew the first thing he would have to do as the new boss was lay off the co-workers he had known for most of his life.
“That’s very tough because everyone here puts their heart and soul into this place,” Haas said. “They’re very dedicated to this airport and want to see it grow.”
Latrobe is a rural speck nestled in the Laurel Highlands, but it has had an airport for at least a century. The Longview Flying Field opened in 1924, and by 1939, the airport was so well regarded, Congress chose it as the site for the country’s first airmail pickup. It hosted flight schools and hobby pilots. And before Spirit arrived in 2011, regional airlines like USAir Express and Northwest Airlines ferried rural Pennsylvanians to Detroit and Chicago.
Haas started working there in 1990, when he was 24. He was hired as a maintenance firefighter by Gabe Monzo, who was also the chief of the local fire department where Haas volunteered. Haas fixed things that went wrong in the terminal, and occasionally — though thankfully, not often, Haas said — he rescued people from aircrafts.
Back then, the airport was called the Westmoreland County Airport, but in 1999, locals decided to change the name to honor one of its most famous residents. The golfer Arnold Palmer grew up a mile from the airport, and he learned to fly there, too. Renaming the airport after Palmer was a big, joyous moment, but Haas learned in those years that an airport can also hold sadness.
Around the time Westmoreland became Arnold Palmer, USAir reduced its fleet and pulled out of Latrobe completely. Haas watched as his bosses “beat the streets and looked for prospects,” and eventually found one. But that service didn’t last forever either, and by 2009, the airport was again without a carrier.
Another workplace might have given into the grief of losing the engine that fuels it, but Monzo made the workplace fun, Haas said. He was a great cook, and he hosted so many dinners at the airport, Haas put on 20 pounds just eating at work.
Two years passed before the airport struck a deal with Spirit, but once it did, traffic boomed. Locals started showing up every day to fly to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After the company added a nonstop to Orlando, the lobby filled up with Mickey Mouse-eared kids on their way to Disney World. By 2015, more than 355,000 people a year were flying out of Arnold Palmer — up from 7,000 in 2010. The airport’s lone restaurant, an Italian “chophouse and Sinatra bar” called DeNunzio’s, even became something of a local hangout. Business executives stayed for long lunches, and players for the Pittsburgh Steelers stopped by after training camp at a nearby college for a nightcap.
“Everybody loves this airport,” Haas said. “We had people come from Canada and Ohio just to jump on a flight. President Trump was in here a few times, and he seemed like he really loved the airport.”
When officials announced in February that Monzo was retiring and Haas would replace him, the airport staff celebrated Haas’s promotion alongside another milestone — Spirit’s 15th anniversary at the airport.
By then, however, the airline had filed for bankruptcy twice and attempted a merger with JetBlue. President Donald Trump had indicated the government might bail out the airline if the price was right. That deal fell through on Haas’s second day as director.
When the last flight left for Myrtle Beach on Friday evening at 5:30, Haas said he had “an inkling” the airline might fold before its passengers made it home to Latrobe. He stayed up late checking his email, then he woke up early to the text from his employee. By 3:30 a.m., he was back at the airport. The parking lot, he noticed as he pulled into a spot, was still full of cars whose drivers were now stranded in South Carolina.
Haas was still so new to the job when Spirit announced its shutdown that he hadn’t even found time to change the greeting on the director’s voicemail. Reporters and customers left dozens of messages on a line with Monzo’s voice.
Days would pass before Haas could get to most of those messages. He had other airlines to call, employees to console.
“I told the staff: ‘Just bear with us. We’re not sitting on our hands not doing anything,’” he said.
In interviews with local stations, Haas said the airport would “have to do a workforce reduction,” but that kind of business speak didn’t begin to touch the pain he felt. This wasn’t just a workforce to him. It was a family.
“I know their children’s names,” he said. “I know what the name of their dog is, what’s going on in their life, what they were like when they were young. It’s really a hard thing to do. It takes a toll.”
Haas isn’t sure how many people he will have to lay off. The airport still has the aviation school and private flights, and he hopes the deals with other carriers will go through by the end of the summer.
In the meantime, Haas is channeling his old boss. He might not be able to whip up a meal the way Monzo could, but he can hit the streets, and he can find another carrier to keep the airport going.
“I look back and think, ‘What would Gabe do?’” Haas said. “He taught me, you respect the people who work here, listen to what they have to say, keep them happy. Make it a good place to work.”
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