The pilot group, except the old guard managers/training department members, loved JC when he first showed up. He cleaned out a corrupt crew scheduling team and generally moved us into the modern world in training, etc. His "sin" was that he was the first non-seniority list guy to come in and exert any real authority over the pilot group. Until then, we'd had a couple of guys (one ex Fed and one freight dog guy) hold upper lever management positions for brief periods of time, but they both were effectively just part of the existing management team - the good ol boy club.

JC came in and removed all of the old guard from both management and training. That created a LOT of enemies. Those enemies are still Spirit pilots, while JC went on to Atlas about six years ago. JC get's a bad rap around here; the real culprits to our misery were: 1. Indigo Partners becoming the controlling member of the ownership team (JC at once lost authority to do anything good that cost a penny) and 2. The world wide financial crisis that almost killed Spirit airlines.

I challenge all of you who hate JC, etc to compare your current position to one of say a Independence Air pilot. or maybe a Midway, or Midwest, or USA3000, or AccessAir, or a TransMeridian, or Vanguard, or ChampionAir, ProAir, or Pace Airlines, or any one of the airlines that failed to survive 2008. Your anger is misplaced. Our foe was not middle management, it was and is a down economy and ownerships draconian measures to keep us going.