The Spirit Airlines homepage on May 2. Photo / spiritairlines.com
Spirit’s president and chief executive Dave Davis said the company in March “reached an agreement with our bondholders on a restructuring plan that would have allowed us to emerge as a go-forward business“.
But skyrocketing jet fuel prices since the start of the Middle East war “left us with no alternative but to pursue an orderly wind-down of the company”, Davis said in the press release.
“Sustaining the business required hundreds of millions of additional dollars of liquidity that Spirit simply does not have and could not procure. This is tremendously disappointing and not the outcome any of us wanted.”
The company said that the lack of additional funding meant Spirit “had no choice but to begin this wind-down”.
Spirit Airlines, which began offering flights in 1992, was known for its yellow-coloured planes and employed just over 11,000 people as of 2024.
The airlines announced in February an “agreement in principle” to restructure its debt with creditors, saying it expected to emerge from bankruptcy by early summer.
But a spike in fuel prices sparked by the US-Israeli war on Iran that started a few days later delivered a heavy blow to the struggling carrier.
– Agence France-Presse