The Yellow Bird Goes Down

The bar at Terminal C in Fort Lauderdale is where I am filing this dispatch, and the man two stools down is crying into a Heineken Light because his wife and three children are stuck in Cancun and Spirit Airlines no longer exists. The television above the bar is showing Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who looks like a man who has been told he must give a TED Talk in twenty minutes about a topic he has just learned exists. He is explaining, with the practiced calm of a hostage reading a statement, that the war in Iran “was not the impetus” for the collapse of one of America’s largest budget airlines. The man with the Heineken Light begins laughing in a way that suggests he may not stop.

This is how it ends, then. Not with the 737 falling out of the sky in a fireball, the way the engineers always warned us. Not with one of those stochastic baggage-handler strikes a senator can blame on China. No — Spirit Airlines, the yellow vulture of the American skies, the carrier that charged you forty dollars to print a boarding pass and then made you stand the duration of a flight to Tampa, the airline that made low-cost travel synonymous with cheap dignity — Spirit died on a Saturday afternoon while the President was at the White House muttering noncommittally about it to a press pool. “It’s something we’re not looking to get involved with,” Trump told reporters Friday, “but if we can, it’s 14,000 jobs.” Twenty-four hours later, those 14,000 jobs were gone, and so were the planes, and so was every human being who had bought a ticket assuming the airline would exist on the day printed on it.

The administration drafted a $500 million bailout. This is a number that sounds like a lot until you remember it was attached to ninety-percent warrants. Read that twice. The free-market party of Reagan and Friedman drew up a plan in which the federal government would functionally NATIONALIZE a private airline — buying the right to ninety cents on every dollar of the resulting entity — and then watched as its own congressional allies, the Trump-aligned hawks and budget moralists, killed the plan in the cradle because it looked like SOCIALISM. Senator, I regret to inform you that everyone can see you.

You cannot kill the bailout for ideological reasons and then appear on television claiming the war you started had nothing to do with the airline going bankrupt while your bombs were still in the air. Or you can. You shouldn’t. They did. Duffy, on Saturday, in front of a row of microphones at a press conference in New Jersey, looked into the camera and said the war “was not the impetus” for the shutdown. Spiking jet fuel prices, in his telling, were a coincidence. The 60-day-and-counting war with Iran had no relationship to the rising operational costs of an airline that had filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024 and was now filing for the corporate equivalent of last rites. None whatsoever. Pure coincidence. Move along.

Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families. — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on X

Warren is correct, of course, and Warren will be ignored, of course, because Warren is a Democrat and the Democrats are currently in their traditional posture of being correct about something six weeks too late while a Republican Transportation Secretary explains that the dead horse died of natural causes shortly after they finished beating it.

The unions, meanwhile, are doing the work the federal government refused to do. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — representing 350 Spirit employees out of the 14,000 Trump quoted on Friday — has positioned representatives to help laid-off baggage handlers and gate agents and mechanics figure out where the next paycheck comes from. The other airlines, sensing fresh meat, have descended on the carcass with rescue fares: JetBlue at $99 through May 6, American and Delta with rescue fares of their own, Frontier offering 50% off base fares through November with the promotional code SAVENOW, which I would estimate has a 73% chance of being the most darkly funny detail in this entire affair. Save now. Save what. The airline is dead. The bailout is dead. Capitalism, as practiced by the United States of America in the spring of 2026, is the act of watching a thing die while screaming at the Department of Transportation that you would have saved it but the principle of the matter forbade it.

Spirit lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2020. Twenty-five billion dollars went up the smokestack of one budget airline. To put that number in any sane perspective: the total bailout the administration was offering — and which Congress killed — was about 2% of what the airline had already lost. Two percent. We were not bailing out Spirit. We were lighting a match next to a building that was already on fire and arguing about whether to use kerosene or gasoline.

The man two stools down has stopped laughing and started looking at his phone with the intense, hopeless concentration of a man trying to summon a JetBlue voucher through sheer force of will. Cancun is a long way away. The Iran war is past sixty days old this morning, depending on who is counting. The Yellow Bird is dead, and somewhere in the West Wing a man who lost half a billion dollars in twelve hours is explaining to a press pool that this was always the plan. The plane, like the country, is no longer airworthy. We are still aboard. The seatbelt sign has been on for years.