Republic to SELL Frontier
 

Gotta love when one jacked up animal tries to sell its dying counterpart. Here! Buy this! You'll lose money and have no idea what to do but give us the money and try!

MSY, here they come!

With A330s, right? That'll work real well. :D

1000 dollars says it Spirit, it would make perfect sense.

Which is why it won't happen.

Maybe Skywest will buy them!

The only valuable assets Frontier has that would appear to interest Spirit (at least, on the face of the deal) are:

• LGA slots/gate (maybe SAN or LAX gate)
• DCA slots (Spirit could sell them, or reverse course and operate to DCA again)
• maybe the CHI - SJD (Cabo) route authority (if this limited, like CHI-CUN, which Frontier lost to AirTran/Southwest)

The rest:

• Frontier is not a ULCC (management running the show now may want them to be, but they're not currently).
• Frontier planes have the wrong engines, and are configured wrong (too few seats, they recline, with TV's).
• DEN is expensive to operate out of, and is already dominated by the world's largest airline (UA) and the US's largest domestic airline (Southwest).
• Frontier's balance sheet is leveraged, with lots of debt (Spirit is debt free).
• The current Frontier fleet mix is 319 dominant (Spirit hasn't added a new 319 to the fleet since Feb. 2008).
• Frontier future delivery positions are superfluous (Spirit has firm orders for 140 aircraft over the next 5 years: 7 A319s [convertible to A320], 53 A320s, 45 A320NEO, and 30 A321s, plus 5 320NEO leases).
• Frontier has few, if any, route authorities Spirit doesn't already have (Spirit serves more of the Caribbean and Central America than Frontier, Southwest/AirTran, and JetBlue . . . combined)

Not putting down Frontier (good luck, guys), but why would it "make perfect sense" for Spirit to be involved? :confused:

The DCA slots went back to Airways. They owed us repayment on the $30million loan and so we took E190s from Airways and they received loan forgiveness and the DCA slots

Frontier flies into DCA currently, and they don't do it as 'US Airways Express', they do it as 'Frontier Airlines', with Airbuses. Frontier must have slots @ DCA to do that, I would think.

If Frontier doesn't have DCA slots . . . well, it makes even LESS sense for Spirit to buy them, as 'CanoePilot' speculated.