When your privately held, the holder has to always make the calculation "does the future return outweigh any near term risks"

Managers at Indigo will have to continue to think that this operation is the best possible use with that "money in the bank" vs shifting gears into something else.

The author of that article is obviously lazy and clueless. He includes Spirit in his list of airlines that are likely to do best surviving the crisis along with the the big three and Southwest. He singles out Frontier even though their business model is nearly identical to Spirit. Then for unexplained reasons says JetBlue will perform best in the next category. ..??
He fails to mention that in the previous downturns the airlines that did the best financially were the non-legacy lower cost carriers. Granted, some of the budget airlines that were not well established or lacked capital went out of business.

He just needed to fill a page, Frontier probably cancelled his family member's flight one time.

The single largest assumption that the original author makes is that hub and spoke flying is a huge advantage over point to point model because of cost savings.

Last I checked our costs were magnitudes less than the traditional model. Seems like flawed logic?

Our CEO seems to think we are well positioned once this all blows over. After 9/11 everyone was trying to do LCC and Southwest expanded. Remember TED, Song, Metrojet etc. I could be wrong but I think people will be more frugal when booking tickets and will go with the lowest price to take the kids to Disney or a weekend in Vegas. Thoughts ?

Anyone that gives you an answer is speculating. Based on the fact that our jobs are linked to the success of the ULCC model and leisure travel market; the speculation we will give has a heavy bias.

I hope that leisure travel bounces back quickly. I hope that the ULCC model has given us the financial stability to weather the storm, and I hope that the model is resilient enough to capture sufficient market share when travel inevitably rebounds.

The stress and uncertainty of this event has a lot of pilots trying to prove that the career decisions they made were the correct one. The unfortunate truth of it is that we won't be certain for another year or two who the winners and losers are in this. I hope for everyone's sake that we all land on our feet softly. It would be nice to go back to the way things were 3 months ago.

The first thought that comes to mind is that Disney isn't opening until some time in 2021.

There's a huge number of websites that follow Disney; and while a 2021 date has been discussed, the consensus seems to be that Shanghai Disney will be the blueprint. A soft opening with SD, Temperature testing and lots of wipe downs of equipment.
Whether that.s enough to get dozens of MCO bound A321's full every day is another question entirely..
The fact remains; unless what we know how about the virus changes markedly; we're not on the road to 2019 until there's a vaccine...

While I agree that confirmation bias is heavy at every airline employee group right now, I think there are multiple well grounded reasons to be optimistic about our position. Since we all have plenty of time, a read of Sam Walton’s auto biography provides a high level view of discounting from the man who arguably did it best. The economics of this thing are obvious but to correlate some of his observations to our industry and particularly to our company right now is incredibly interesting.

Something I think that gets understated about Frontier is the agility it has from the way infrastructure is assembled , its size, and its current corporate governance. We to a large degree redeployed our fleet twice a year prior to this. The articles that suggest we are going to fail do so based on speculation about demand on our route network as it existed before this began. I would guess that some changes that reflect the world as it is now will be coming by the fall. Another great biography is “Boyd: The fighter pilot who changed the art of war”. After reading his theory’s on conflict is difficult to not view us with some advantage.

Of course I’m biased in all this because my livelihood is at stake. I am quite concerned however about all of our future employment prospects. In a free market I think we would at least hold our own and survive. Unfortunately I believe that we live in a society where more times than not the dollar spent lobbying is more effective than the one spent innovating. To that end, I think our biggest risk is that the government picks the winners and Frontier lacks the influence required to assure we get put the list.

To your last point about the government picking winners and losers. One of the biggest benefits to accepting the stimulus was it locked in a % of funding that we can always argue we deserve going forward with any other potential bailout funding.

Spirit guy here. I have the utmost confidence in the business model..it’s easy to say from the outside looking in and we all get a little panicked when we read things about the place that cuts our checks. As an outsider, remember NK and F9 don’t need to operate like others to maintain profitability. I believe both of us will be ok long term but it’s gonna be a tough few years. I do however believe that this craziness makes our marriage an almost certainty.