Originally Posted by FriendlyPilot

First of all, I sincerely hope NK is bought in whole by another airline so that the jobs can be maintained. UA, DL, WN are the most likely candidates, but unfortunately I don't see that happening.

Spirit's market cap is $300M. The operating entity has no real value. Nobody in the investor world thinks NK is going to be an ongoing concern. If someone wanted to buy them it would have happened. $300M was 10 days of cashflow for United and Delta in Q2. No one wants the entity because of the debt they would have to acquire. Assets are a different scenario.

Someone buying the debt (junk bonds) at a discount is the worst possible scenario. They aren't going to let their investment go to zero. Their exit strategy is going to be to sell the assets to whoever will buy them for a profit. They don't care about the ongoing company, just their return.

Also there isn't going to be a SLI in this scenario. Those planes will possibly end up at another airline after the inspections are done, etc but the pilots aren't going to "go with them". Merger policy is designed when an airline buys a whole or part of an operating airline or fragmented airline, not an asset purchase like planes, gates etc. NK will likely be an asset sale, even if one airline buys most of the assets, which is unlikely. The planes aren't really the valuable asset here, but instead its the gates and slots at slot-restricted airports. NK has already given back their future orders, so they weren't really worth what people thought there were worth, or they would have kept them to help in being acquired. Now any airline can just go grab those future orders, and its likely they have already been acquired.

The combination of the engine issues, legacies going after leisure travel post-covid, the stalled/failed B6 merger, and a lack of foresight with NK management to pivot the product to changing economic conditions, is why this ship is going down so fast.

The good news is for pilots that you will all end up with pilot jobs at other airlines. I hope ALPA makes a push for preferential hiring at UA and DL, which will be the airlines hiring the most pilots over the next few years.

Good luck to all of you.