If you moved on, you should.... Move on. Your "caring" words doesn't seem to be welcome, nor providing solace to the pilots that still remain there.

They decided to ride it out and tune out the noise. The company is either going to merge, make it on its own, or go out of business. If you’re riding it out, not much to do other than go to work and let it run its course.

I believe the company will eventually liquidate. That being said I don’t want to see that happen. Tens of thousands of innocent people will lose their jobs through no fault of their own if that happens. You would have to be pretty messed up to want to see that happen. Have a little empathy. Airlines in dire stress have turned it around in the past.

If you haven't covered your ass at this point, you can not claim no fault of your own

Thats essentially my point.

I think TRUMP will say "you're fired". I cant see him agreeing to bail out NK. I guess we will find out next week. I hope that NK can somehow survive this tho.

I could see them trying to frame it as putting a company out of business and hurting others, causing job loss, and hurting people (voters) that need help affording flights which will pander to his sworn enemy the Democratic Party. Not that I agree or disagree just seeing that as an argument they may wield.

If you give money to spirit due to high fuel prices then you better give it to every other airline and company that’s affected by fuel prices also. This is a dumb but I guess desperate ask from NK.

time to close it up.

If it was even true to begin with I am assuming the reported “rumored ch. 7 by the end of the week” may have been delayed for this last ditch effort.

Your last sentence though. Not nice.

Here is the DOT response when they were asked about it. Looks like it could be politically advantageous and save jobs, while helping preserve low fares.


“We're monitoring the situation surrounding Spirit.

As you know, Spirit's financial difficulties stretch back to its first bankruptcy in 2024 and the failures of the last administration.

When Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg blocked a proposed Spirit/JetBlue merger in 2024, their DOJ bragged it was "a victory for U.S. travelers who deserve lower prices and better choices." If American consumers were faced with one fewer ultra low cost carriers, they would obviously disagree.”

Hypothetically If the government was willing to give NK a check what would the numbers on that check be?

Assume this Is a one time interest free loan with a 20 year term.

This is all much water under the bridge. Spirit had offers from Frontier after the failed JetBlue merger, which spirit leadership shot down. Heck, the offers were probably acceptable valuations but to an incompetent leadership team that has now driven the company into a ditch that couldn't withstand a shock that is known to appear in this industry, aka fuel price spikes, hubris or shock got the better of them. Now they should get nothing. I do think A4A, ALPA, AFA and the Airport lobby groups at least should go and both represent the interests of their stakeholders and tell the administration that if they get money, we should all get money. On the other hand, if they fail, we will endeavor to offer every single one of their employees interviews for positions that they are qualified for, and the routes that are lost will be quickly filled with at least some basic economy fares. That is all much better than saving a Company that has been sitting there digging it's own hole for years now.

You can claim that it was Biden’s fault, but yet again, here are some facts:

A Reagan appointed judge applied the law (The Clayton Act, if I remember correctly) and blocked the deal.

When asked on the stand if NK was in trouble (flailing firm), TC testified that it was not a flailing firm.

We were in financial trouble long before B6 made their offer and derailed the long planned F9 merger attempt.

You can blame the previous administration all day long, but facts are facts!

1. You have no idea what the offers were or how they were structured.
2. Its not the management team that calls those shots, its the bond holders.
3. The government allowed 3 supersized carriers to merge, then decided a super small carrier cant merge with a small carrier to create ...checks notes... the 7th in size carrier. ... THEN turned around and allowed the AK/HA merger, and now making statements about wishing for super sized mergers , UA/AA statements, blah blah blah.

Previous executive team company mis-management, different government administrations, etc etc. Sure.

Still. The government is what allowed the current noncompetitive landscape to exist, allowing 1000 airplane airlines. Then it turns around in its infinite wisdom and sues to block a savior from purchasing us saying that if a single customer is harmed it cannot be allowed. And now we are 1/3 the size.

Jetblue is having their own issues. I doubt the merger would have yielded a different result in the long run.

Of course it would’ve been different. Long term debt would have financed the merger and an 8,000-9,000 pilot group isn’t going anywhere quickly.

Is it better for JetBlue it didn’t happen, yeah probably. Would the company be in chapter 11 right now? Doubt it and even in a chapter 11 scenario, they’d be too big to fail.

A boomer judge from Elizabeth Warren territory is not a typical business friendly Republican judge. I’m also not so sure they played as much politics with judges back then and judge young was always a more moderate judge.

The previous admin should not have sued to block the merger. So it shouldn’t have gotten to the judge anyway. Just like they didn’t with Alaska/HA and now the Trump admin didn’t with Allegiant/Sun Country.

Too big to fail is one of the most incompetent arguments in this generation of aviation.

Those mergers were 15+ years ago. Total non-sequitur

your first 2 points would have been completely moot if Biden/Buttigieg had not sued to stop the merger. The blame may not rest solely with the previous administration, but they were the certainty the biggest factor in the merger getting shot down.

without a doubt the biggest blame is on Lina Kahn and the Biden admin. Really sucks for all involved.

look at G4/SY, the gov didn’t even look at it. They fast tracked this so fast that now management is gonna be caught with their pants down because the deal is gonna close 3-6 months earlier than management’s best case scenario.

Except that if that admin wouldn't have sued, there would have been a line of plaintiffs doing that.

Most of which would not have had the legal standing or ability to successfully block a merger in court. Very hard for states to file lawsuits alleging violation of federal anti trust laws and federal interstate commerce (airline) if the federal government agreed to the merger. Individual consumers and groups, even harder.

doubtful

What airline mergers have been stopped by a lawsuit not brought by the federal government?

who would have had standing to sue that would not have benefited from the merger?

who sued to stop AS/HA, or SY/G4, or any of the legacy behemoths?

the only people who wanted that merger to fail were the legacies and the Biden administration. And from what I could gather at the time, it was so they could set a precedent to use against big tech companies

The fact is that it was the previous administration who took time out of their busy day of going after parents who complain to their PTAs to take this to Federal Court where the judge had no choice to rule the way they did. That is the fact. I do not think the current administration would take this to court. As a matter of fact I know they won't.

As what happens with every merger in every business. So not an excuse at all.

Can someone explain why the extra "restricted cash", mandated by the December 2025 extension of the credit card processing agreement with US Bank, is suddenly gone?

Nov filing: 586 cash + 205 restricted cash
Dec filing: 272 cash + 591 restricted cash
Jan filing: 610 cash + 212 restricted cash
Feb filing: 560 cash + 219 restricted cash

It appears the company moved the restricted cash back to unrestricted cash again?

If US Bank still had their approximately 380 million restriction, cash on hand would be down to 180 million (minus losses for March and April).

This definitely changes how long the company will be able to operate.

No wonder US Bank want it liquidated.

The NEA was also undone, had it been this admin JetBlue would never had exited the NEO and the merger with Spirit would never have materialized.

So either way, no merger would've happened with Spirit and JetBlue. Who knows where'd they'd be now though.

I paraphrased your response as I'm just looking at the statute and who did what in the past isn't really relevant in this case.

Clayton Act specifically allows private parties to enforce and seek injunction to block a merger, so I bet AA/DL/UA would have sued if DOJ didn't.

In this case they didn't have to as litigation is expensive and DOJ did it for them, but they could have delayed it for a long time and I bet they had the appetite to do so.

Not an excuse, just an observation.
The person to blame is TC with his "Spirit has a path to profitability" BS, which is why the judge blocked the distressed carrier argument. We might be flying SpiritBlue right now if TC would have had the humility to say we are going to be out of business in a year if this does not go through.

The money being held by US Bank is not "restricted cash". its actually part of Spirit's "unrestricted cash". Its a GAAP nuance. Its Spirit's money, they just don't have possession of it. Its being held by US Bank. My guess is whoever did the December MOR screwed up and accounted for the US Bank holdback as "restricted" which means they are holding about $380M of Spirit's cash to pay back people that bought tickets in the event Spirit closes its doors.

The bad news is that Spirit looks to be burning $2M a day according to the February MOR and probably a lot more now because of fuel prices.

Spirit can't just burn down to $0 because of minimum liquidity covenants which are independent of restricted cash. Its highly likely that Spirit's unrestricted cash could be down to its "liquidity covenants" which is why all the talk about shutting down.

Another huge problem is that there are probably a large number of book-aways because of all the warnings of a shut down, so people are not booking on Spirit and its just going to accelerate.

B6 chose to abandon the NEA in order to pursue the NK merger. They could have appealed the decision along with AA.

Is it true your system CP left for UAL?

I remember when everyone said they would never let Pan Am fail. It was practically our national airline.

The system chief did. I saw his name on our new hire list about a 1.5 months ago.

yes. Keep that ****ing piece of ****

if the heavy hitters are leaving they must know something others don’t.

what more is there left to know?

Chief Pilot as in RR or as in MN?

RR is at UA

lol not even a close comparison. At peak, Pan Am had 150 jets, not 1000. Wanna guess there peak # of people they moved…. 11 million. UAL moved 165 million people in a year. Even F9 has higher metrics than Pan am when it comes to jets and people moved