In May, ultra-low-fare Spirit Airlines announced that it would ground all flights and shut down, effective immediately. That happened despite “extensive and comprehensive efforts to restructure the business” and “create a sustainable path forward,” the airline explained in a press release.
Government meddling helped doom Spirit’s attempts to save itself. In July 2022, JetBlue announced that it would acquire Spirit for $3.8 billion. Spirit, which had long thrived on low fares and high profit margins, struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic, and JetBlue’s offer was a last-ditch effort. The Biden administration sued to stop the merger, fearing that a combined carrier would leave too few low-cost competitors. “Spirit’s presence in a market forces other air carriers, including JetBlue, to lower their fares,” the Justice Department explained.
The government prevailed. In January 2024, a federal court blocked the deal as anticompetitive. “To those dedicated customers of Spirit, this one’s for you,” wrote U.S. District Judge William G. Young. Jonathan Kanter, then the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, called it “a victory for U.S. travelers who deserve lower prices and better choices.”
It wasn’t a victory for Spirit, which declared bankruptcy later that year and again in 2025. Then, in February 2026, President Donald Trump launched a war against Iran, sending oil and gas prices skyward. Between February and May, the price of jet fuel nearly doubled, rising from $2.12 to $4.16 per gallon.
Announcing the end of operations, Spirit cited “the recent material increase in oil prices and other pressures on the business.” But the airline was in dire straits even before the war began.
Weeks before the war, The Air Current reported that “at least two major U.S. airlines” expected Spirit to shutter within days. Frontier Airlines, which had offered to buy Spirit before JetBlue’s offer won out, reopened talks in December 2025, but Spirit again rejected its offer. “Spirit could have survived if they had accepted our agreement and merged with us,” former Frontier CEO Barry Biffle told Forbes.
Airline industry expert Gary Leff thought it would have been a mistake for JetBlue to buy Spirit, but only because the Justice Department had also sued to kill a previously approved partnership with American Airlines that would have let JetBlue access larger markets. “It was a bad antitrust theory,” Leff wrote, that treated such partnerships as illegal “rather than looking at consumer benefit or total competition in the market.”
No single factor is wholly responsible for Spirit’s failure. But any postmortem should note how two successive presidential administrations exacerbated the struggling carrier’s misfortunes.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Who Killed Spirit Airlines?.”
