The latest Union email included a company presentation that a new contract would push Frontier into bankruptcy within 12 months. Over the past four years Frontier has burned through over $1 billion in negative free cash flow without a new contract in place.

Unfortunately all these numbers can be checked on public sources. We aren’t far behind Spirit, and as legacy airlines continue to dump basic economy seats into the market it’s not going to get better.The profits being referenced were nothing more than accounting sleight of hand sale-leaseback transactions used to inject short-term cash while stacking long-term lease obligations onto the books. Strip away the sale-leaseback money and we are hemorrhaging cash.