Spirit Airlines and the Death of Leisure for the Non-Leisure Class
“Spirit Airlines, a low-cost carrier known for its affordable fares and no-frills service, ceased operations, leaving 17,000 employees jobless and customers awaiting refunds. The airline, which operated on an à-la-carte model, offered a stripped-down flying experience, charging extra for luggage, snacks, and legroom. Despite its flaws, Spirit provided a sense of freedom and accessibility to air travel for many, contributing to its cultural significance.
The low-cost carrier was a mess. But it was also an icon of budget travel, facilitating a kind of modest freedom for the masses.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The New Yorker
After Spirit Airlines ceased operations, in the middle of the night on May 2nd, a series of canary-yellow airplanes sat on the tarmac at Newark Airport, arranged neatly like children’s toys at day’s end. Travellers flying in or out of the hub ogled the spectacle, a display of sudden corporate collapse. Now that the airline is officially dead, following one failed government bailout and a couple of failed mergers, seventeen thousand workers are in need of employment, and thousands of customers await refunds. Meanwhile, Spirit’s jets are being ferried, one by one, to the desert—a storage field at Goodyear Airport, in Arizona, where they await their fate. What was leased will be repossessed to recover debt in bankruptcy court. What was old will be scrapped and sold for parts. What is functional will be recouped by competitors that will benefit from the death of this icon of budget air travel, which facilitated a kind of low-grade freedom for the masses.
Spirit dying, or getting itself killed, is another episode in the protracted crisis of aviation this season. The feeling is one of precarity; the act of flying, which had retained that glint of preciously guarded leisure activity, is now a microcosm of the tumult of the Trump Administration. Should we tabulate the events? The Administration’s cowboy capture of the Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd, prompted an airspace closure in the Caribbean, stranding many populations, none as humbled as the American tourists, gone to the islands for rest and relaxation over the winter holiday. Airports themselves, liminal spaces that, normally, are pleasantly severed from the lurches of the world, spun out, too. After ICE and C.B.P. agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, House Democrats forced a partial government shutdown, halting the flow of funds to the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Transportation Security Administration. Agents, forced to work without pay, called in sick; security lines metastasized, sometimes snaking out to the curb. In a bid to restore order, Donald Trump planted ICEagents, some of whom were in plainclothes, at major airports; in San Francisco, two agents in athletic zip-ups forced a mother to the ground, arresting her while passengers heckled the officers and her young daughter wailed. More recently, the war in Iran, and the resulting exorbitant increases in fuel costs, threaten to make flying prohibitively expensive for many, and have made it much harder to reach certain destinations.
The consumer finds herself a dupe. Planning air travel, she does not have an idea of what to expect. Spirit flaunted a low-cost model, with some domestic flights costing less than a cab to the airport. The experience was purely, aggressively functional. From Point A to Point B. Although Spirit had a few American competitors in the budget space, such as Frontier and Southwest, it was the one among them that had a cultural lore. If Pan American Airways represented, at its height, victory and suavity, the country achieving a kind of European state of grace, then Spirit was the exact opposite—synonymous with the rowdy and the rude at the heart of the American character. After the closure was announced, every single late-night-show host paid their respects to an accidental muse of Americana. “This is the worst news for my writers since they fixed LaGuardia,” Seth Meyers complained. “If the Mets start winning, we might have to put them on a psychiatric hold.”
In 1978, Congress deregulated the airline industry. Spirit introduced itself to the market, five years later, as Charter One. The service, according to its website, began in Detroit, shuttling passengers to vacation hot spots, like Vegas and the Bahamas. The rebranding as Spirit came in 1992; the business model in 2007. Spirit operated by the à-la-carte model, condensing the up-front cost to the seat and the seat only, along with one personal item. Each additional piece of luggage incurred a separate cost, as did snacks, as did legroom. In later years, following economic losses after COVID, the airline introduced more upgrades—“Go Big,” for an extremely attenuated version of business-class seating, with free drinks, or “Go Comfy,” with one non-alcoholic drink. Of course, the point of flying Spirit was to spend as little money as possible. It is not valorizing the company to point out that it identified a need: for air travel to be stripped of its economic identity as a splurge so that as many people as possible could access it. To be clear, Spirit was a mess. The customer service sucked. The predatory add-ons were annoying. Leg space was nonexistent. I know all of this because I flew Spirit frequently.
“Less Money. More Go” was one of many cheeky official mottos. “We’re Dollar General,” Ben Baldanza, the former C.E.O. said. Did the connotations of travelling with Spirit carry a sense of embarrassment? Maybe, for some. Airport-lounge culture, currently, is out of control; the clamor to “get in” to Delta One Lounge or HelloSky is surely a marker of the exclusionary, bourgeois desires that somehow still attend an experience that is, at base, a mode of transportation. No one who flew Spirit was doing caviar bumps in a lounge.
Still, the stereotype of the Spirit customer was not of a traveller cowed by a need to be thrifty. Viral videos of onboard brawls contributed to the airline’s notoriety. There were racial and class elements, of course, to the reviling of Spirit, which was often referred to—both lovingly and hatefully—as “the ghetto airline.” It catered to passengers who were deemed to lack the etiquette required to fly: the girls’-trip groups, the large families, the spring breakers. In the air, innocuous human behavior carries a sense of threat. A snobbery persists: that flying is a privilege, not a right. In recent years, Spirit tried to shed its reputation. The company hired a marketing agency to make Spirit “More Fly.” Then came an updated policy giving the airline the right to refuse service to customers who were “inadequately clothed” or who had offensive tattoos.
I had a flight to catch on May 3rd, the morning after Spirit’s operations ended. Whenever I am preparing to fly, a line from Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights” creeps into my mind: “When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.” The erasure of the self is a gratification we all deserve. For better and often for worse, Spirit facilitated that. A passenger on one of the last Spirit flights recorded a video of a pilot as he tearfully bid adieu over the cabin speakers: “Met a lot of friends along the way. Had some great conversations with some of you over the fourteen years. Had some not so great conversations occasionally. A lot of crazy stuff has happened.” ♦
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