I don't think he's wrong. If you look at what they are doing on the docket, Spirit and it's creditors are setting up for a transaction. the most interesting thing is the most recent DIP amendment makes adjustments to the payment waterfalls and recovery rights of creditors.

If you amend those portions, then later agree to a transaction, you'd have to redo your work on the DIP amendment, so the amendment implies there is a transaction agreement whose details are known to the creditors.

Spirit also elected to defer the deadline to reject or retain certain leases, and I believe they have also opted to not reject certain aircraft. That's an action that could comport with maintaining the estate for a change of ownership.

Secondly, the DIP strongly rewards cash in favor of other assets like debt, equity, or other assets. Southwest fits that hole, but so do other airlines like Alaska - airlines with the balance sheet to please creditors. Whether they want to, I don't know.

What I do know is that there were three bidders for Spirit as of November. One of those was Frontier. Frontiers problem is they don't have a lot of cash, their debt is crappy, and equity is also bad. Their business is also low yielding or even money losing. Frontier will have to put down a lot of cash if they want to win a bid, to the point the success of the integration and turn around could be jeopardized. While the DIP and secured creditors may not care cause they'll cash out, the UCC and EC wouldn't like having their debts equities into that situation.

A bigger and better capitalized airline isn't going to have these issues, and now is likely the friendliest antitrust environment you can expect for awhile. Nows the time.

I hope it's Southwest, not quite there on thinking it has to be. I strongly suspect it isn't Frontier though.