Let's Buy Spirit Air(letsbuyspiritair.com) |
Let's Buy Spirit Air(letsbuyspiritair.com) |
Nobody is buying spirit air... a bunch of gamblers just want to pump the price monday morning.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/who-killed-spirit-airline...
The employees are all gone and shuttered, even if you go try to rehire them they are all jumping to any other company if they stayed to the end. The pilots and cabin crew lost seniority and you won’t be able to afford ALPA union pay or AFA pay.
So while they somehow raised 26 million, it feels like a hollow gesture so that the creditors get paid but not really be realized into an actual airline with an AOC
At 26 million raised it’s actually better to make a new airline and run it lean. Get a good route or two and it could work, but 26 million is lean but doable. The liquidators want to get spirt planes released asap.
On Our maiden voyage aboard spirit, they dumped us halfway home, in las vegas. No compensation, no meal voucher, no overnight accomodation - they just DUMPED US (along with 30 other connecting passengers).
Spirit seems incapable of holding a flight even 5 mins for connecting passengers delayed via spirit's incompetence!
We saw them slam the door 50FT away to our connecting plane as we got off our plane. We watched in horror - our faces against the airport glass - as our next-leg pilot looked up at us and sat on the tarmac 30ft away doing NOTHING for 20 minutes as Spirit told us "nothing could be done" and "you missed your connecting flight" and "see the agent to get DUMPED AND NOTHING, later".
Warren and Sanders are just reflexively against big businesses.
Why is this automatically the case?
Here, let me try:
She killed a merger a couple years ago that would have ended up with the shutdown of both companies, now we at least have Jet Blue intact.
Both of our statements are equally speculative.
A more honest prediction: Merging Spirit and JetBlue would have resulted in the combined airline going bankrupt anyway, but it would have been too big to let fail so they would’ve been bailed out. And the taxpayer would be propping up yet more failed companies.
When the Packers upgrade their stadium and charge higher prices for tickets, I can promise you that they won't use the profits to buy back your shares or pay you a dividend.
1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.
2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?
3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!
4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.
5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.
6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.
7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!
8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.
9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._
10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.
11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.
12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?
13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.
14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.
15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.
16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).
17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.
I was doing a two hour flight monthly for business, 2 hours each way. Frontier was about half the cost of more premium airlines. The times were good and predictable. I never checked anything and maybe rarely I’d buy a snack. Now I won’t claim that it was “comfortable” but it was predictable, inexpensive and kind of efficient all of which sort of creates a ‘comfort.’ It was a flying bus and it was ok at that.
Somewhere, I think when there became competition for the ultra discount airlines, the staff culture changed and it seemed not uncommon to encounter an employee that resented the customers. Spirit had multiple reported incidents of crew filming customers and just being generally antagonistic. Basically they hire service people that generally don’t have to provide much service and it becomes ”extra work” when they do;worse they often see a price tag associated with the “extra work” and it’s not reflected in their compensation
And it was cheap, so you could book a next day flight without paying multiples in premium.
It was fun and affordable to fly out of state in the morning, spend a day exploring another place and get back at night.
https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1psiwws/us_airlines...
There's no way they could get away with something significantly different, right? Like anything else they'd just be liable for being sued?
Great idea in theory but…
If it would be TWA or PanAm my reaction would be positive.
*and fail to
- Warren Buffett (Comedian)
Brilliant.
Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere
Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do.
Useful watch (skip to 2:20): https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4?si=cyysP7aH_CIEDZRq
Company makes too little money: "there's no money in this industry! They need to be a regulated utility!"
I'm not saying that this a better outcome (power companies have their problems too). I was just commenting that this issue parallels the historical solution that was applied to utility companies.
Honestly, with the looming climate crisis, we should probably just let them fail one by one and let alternatives (who can actually be profitable) take off.
I'd also feel similar I'd my primary water, electricity, or internet provider was on the brink of failing due to "free market pressures".
Because the majority of the HN crowd defaults to "a massive government bureaucracy would do this better" unless it's even tangentially related to their industry in which case it's "regulations bad" and "move fast break things."
For a much deeper dive on this, see https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/gary-leff-fre...
(there's a well-formatted text transcript)
This sort of thing all the time when (for example) a movie lover opens a movie theater. Running a profitable movie theater is a lot less about movies and a lot more about maximizing concession revenue.
Best not to generalize.
The RyanAir CEO was even quoted that he expected some tickets to be come "zero-fare" Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/22/ryanair-fli...
The point stands, airlines don't make money on flights. Flights are loss leaders.
Spirit was designed to be ultra low cost, which attracts flyers that are much more price sensitive. Higher Jet A costs means higher ticket prices, which means lost customers, which means lost revenue. Pulling a JetBlue and adding higher tier product offerings to attract the business travelers that _actually_ makes money for airlines would've required an overhaul of their entire business, which they couldn't afford to do.
I agree that Spirit will be chopped up by whoever buys them. It happened to Braniff, PanAm, and a whole bunch of other airlines that weren't thrown a lifeline.
(JetBlue tried to acquire Spirit to prevent this outcome, but the acquisition didn't pass antitrust. Everyone knew that that acquisiton failing was a death sentence to Spirit, but it was what it was.)
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If the company is worth more to the market and society when sold as pieces, so be it.
Before them Alaska Air was similar, and is now similarly bad.
Having the customers actually own the airline seems like a reasonable approach. The trick is kicking all the assholes off the board, so they can’t fire leadership for treating customers decently while turning a sustainable profit.
American Airlines has the largest loyalty program.
In last week’s report to shareholders they project it will grow to $1.5B in pre tax revenue, against a total 2025 pre tax revenue of $54bn (50bn passenger revenue).
The core business of airlines is still airlines. Optimizing TRASM & CASM, with tremendous effort on upsell and cross sell of premium services (seats, bags, food), at every point in the passenger flow.
This is true for American Airlines: https://viewfromthewing.com/new-report-says-aadvantage-is-wo...
If that's the case then how RyanAir survived and is thriving?
Some flights make money.
Some flights lose money.
Some finance structures make money while looking like losses to acrue tax benefits for other activities.
Sometimes the money is being made by holding companies not operating companies. Sometimes the assets are worth more as spares than operating.
All companies are complex. I do not think "flights don't make money" is true for all airlines, all flights.
Case in point: Old Perry Mason shows where characters regularly drive to the airport, pay for a ticket and get on a plane. Flying was actually faster than driving back then, even when measured by time between deciding to leave and arriving at destination!
(Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more. Whatever. Figure in the price for camping in the airport for 4-5 hours, and then tell me the current system is cheaper!)
But you have to follow the same model: use cheaper airports, a single modern aircraft type to simplify operations, high turnaround speed, charge a lot for extras.
Southwest has 30B in assets and makes $441M in profit. Like most airlines it’s a miracle of modern economics and should practically be considered a charity or a nonprofit. You would make more in treasuries or corporate bonds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world
Obviously their model is different to the big American carriers. Perhaps there’s something about the homogeneity of the US domestic market compared to the EU market that favors loyalty based airlines versus budget airlines.
Member-owned co-ops don't need to make money. Structuring an airline as a member-owned co-op is not a fundamentally-stupid idea.
Even in this "airlines as point program companies" view of the world, flights don't make money in the same way that electricity going into data centers don't make money. It's a place where you have major costs and you want to try and gamify it, but at the end of the day it's pretty necessary for successful operations!
Consider why airline points even work as a model in the first place! Airlines have blackout dates and don't offer every seat in a plane for points because _they can make money selling a seat for more than what the points are worth to them_.
I don't get it. Why should they have been turned into utilities? Just because the current iteration loses money?
Please be aware that airline pricing is endogenous. That means, it's not set from the outside, but a reaction to market conditions and feeds back into market conditions. Eg airlines might be on the edge of profitability at time X, but when at time Y fuel prices drop a bit (or rise a bit) that doesn't mean that airline will suddenly all make lots of money (or all go bankrupt): the pricing of their product will adjust.
That doesn't only go for fuel prices, but also for loyalty programme revenue. If such revenue is available and competition is fierce, then prices will go down until airline can just about stay afloat after taking that extra revenue into account.
> Private equity will likely sell the company for parts.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
There's another more fundamental problem with airlines like Spirit, which is they can't effectively make this change. Loyalty programs / credit card tiers require differentiated service. This is one of the drivers for why Southwest changed their entire seating model to match the other big players in the industry even though their Ops data showed faster boarding times using unassigned seating.
When you're on the lower tier of the market like Southwest and other budget airlines, creating differentiated service mostly means making things worse for most passengers, not better, in order to have loyalty programs provide a pathway to avoid the suck.
Traditional airlines are very much like Starbucks nowadays in that they are essentially banks, but low cost carriers are closer to movie theaters where they essentially make nothing selling the actual seat so the more people they get in the door, the more they can make on ancillaries.
I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.
In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.
Spirit has been doing this since it's inception. The collapse of their business can't be through lack of this alone.
I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags. I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty. It is a stupid game that I am forced to play, because the credit cards also provide other benefits, such as fraud protection.
I am wondering right now if "Spirit Air 2.0" even has a fighting chance if they are not able to subsidize operating costs by also being a credit card company.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/delta-air-lines-m...
Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.
Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.
I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.
I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.
Noble, but this will fail. Why would anyone do this? No incentive.
These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business. You might as well get more pledges given that you'd have more control and the same profit share. It will regress to the same as the status quo.
> *0* hedge fund owners. Zero
or including the date Spirit collapsed (despite already mentioning it earlier on the page!). Why not also include “*6* letters in ‘Spirit’” while you’re at it?
whether it's an llm, a template or bespoke made from bytecode doesn't really matter does it?
But I'm just not sure the demand would be there for longer distances unless it's so cheap that it's worth the extra time.
Like what's China to Kunmung, a 6 hour flight vs a 12 hour train, at a comparable cost?
Even with Japanese level high speed rail NYC to LA still takes much much longer than flying.
You need to buy land. Disrupt wildlife, and various ecosystems.
The government should of bailed out Spirit instead. They served a public good.
Allowing lower to middle income people to travel helps everyone.
How could it do anything but fail?
The cooperative was born out of exploitation: farmers in Kheda, Gujarat, were forced to supply milk to Polson Dairy, which held a monopoly and paid farmers unfairly through commission-taking agents.
AMUL returns 85% of every rupee earned back to farmers — far above the global average of 33% — and procures milk at rates 15–20% higher than private dairies.
AMUL's democratic governance ensures farmers elect board members who represent their interests, and the Managing Director of each unit is appointed by this farmer-led board — not the state government — preventing political interference and corruption.
AMUL demonstrates how a business can achieve large-scale commercial success while prioritising social justice and environmental care — through collective ownership, democratic governance, equitable profit-sharing, and community investment — offering a powerful model for cooperatives worldwide.
I'm surprised they don't also include a team page with a bunch of ChatGPT-generated photographs of fresh-faced fake people to really sell it.
Spirit was an objectively terrible airline. Their business model failed. They folded. The end. This is why you can't fly Braniff or Southern Airways anymore in 2026. Failed businesses go under, they don't live on in perpetuity.
totalMembers: 4954
totalPledged: 5678872
averagePledge: 1146.320549
However the numbers on the website appear to be hardcoded in with very dramatically different numbers.
One of the creditors that piloted their exit from the first bankruptcy also provided on $80M out of a $270M line of credit secured by assets Spirit needed to survive (an RCF was backed by their right to take-off and land at LGA amoungst other thinfs)
1 week before the 2nd bankruptcy, Spirit drew against the entirety of that line of credit.
During the 2nd bankruptcy, besides rolling large amounts the debt owed to them from the 1st bankruptcy (so Spirit would need to pay it back before other creditors), they had the proceeds of plane sales go towards... interest payments on their RCF and paying back additional financing from the 2nd bankruptcy.
The creditors leading the 2nd bankruptcy also sold the lease to Spirit's largest hangar on April 2nd, but did a similar thing again: instead of the cash going towards operations, it went to the creditors who'd led both bankruptcies.
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Seeing as they refused the government's bailout, I'm guessing this is doomed as well, but interesting stuff for a non-finance person
A period documentary about the Meridian Triumph motorcycles co op. Sad, thoughtful take on a particular bit of British manufacturing history. That the co op started with a strike, had to trade exclusively with a single customer, and that the senior workers became the managers they hated.
Due to the structure of that co op there was no way for them to access the capital they needed to redevelop their products and it ended up in private hands as a result, leaving the workers with nothing. I don’t think I would wish a co op on anybody.
I like the approach Bob's Red Mill took.
Bullhockey. Wall Street doesn’t assign debt. Poor management and bad risk-assessment leads to assuming bad debt.
This is like saying it’s the car’s fault that you drove to work today…
To be clear, the proposed Spirit Air 2.0 would also be answerable to shareholders. A structural difference is that each shareholder would have one vote regardless of capital contribution. But the real substantive difference is the spirit of what they’re fighting for: worker ownership, affordable fares, transparent operations, no golden parachutes, etc.
They probably believe they'll get more money back from selling the aircraft. If American or United want a new airplane they place an order and wait 5 or more years for delivery. No airline has excess airplanes available to take new routes. They are so expensive just a handful being idle (outside of expected maintenance winodws) would erase all profit. That means if there is a new opportunity it can take a very long time to go after it.
Airlines from around the world will line up to buy every single one of Spirit's airplanes because it means they can have one _today_. A few might even pay premium prices for them.
Airlines are a cyclical business. Boeing and Airbus gobble up every spare dollar on the back end and customer pressure eats up the front end. Then you're subject to all sorts of random shocks outside your control without much ability to adjust your fixed costs. A difficult business to be in.
1) Revenue/Route management: re-think the routes with a ruthless focus on sustainable routes with defensible margins.
2) Customer experience and Brand: being an LCC can't come at the expense of customers, i.e., the fare is so cheap we get to treat you like shit.
3) Capital-structure & cost base: you need to right-size the debt, fix liquidity, and ensure you have a durable cost structure (fuel-risk management, etc.)
The argument I have seen is that blocking it resulted in Spirit dying and people losing their jobs and there being less competition.
Wouldn’t the same exact thing have happened regardless? Am i supposed to believe that Jet Blue would have kept all of those employees? There would be one less competitor anyway, and in the merger case they’re even more powerful now meaning competing is harder.
It seems to me it’s just that creditors want to be paid out by a merger rather than paid our for cents on the dollar when it died on it’s own.
No idea if the extra time "normal" fuel prices would have allowed Spirit to find a way to stay afloat, but the fuel price spike stole any time they had to figure it out.
Plus, it's a carbon-polluting business that props up dirty, corrupt petrochem industries and regimes.
Let it die.
They used to be. Read up on "Civil Aeronautics Board".
Regulation won't magically save low margin businesses.
Nationalizing might, but then you make it difficult to compete for others. And of course, there's plenty of precedence of nationalized airlines failing catastrophically and having to be sold off to private or foreign entities to keep functioning.
Enough money for who? One person has a pay package north of $30 million.
"If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."
https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines.html
If they can build a model similar to REI, count me in.
https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4?t=2m20s
Bonus: auto-jumps to 2:20
yeah in the US airlines are fintechs.
Unions are one of the more effective ways for workers to fight back against "divide and conquer". Unions work to slightly adress the massive power imbalance between employer and employee; that's why the wealthy hate them and spread negative propaganda about them.
Just to be clear, that isn't what the article says. It says more than what "most" airlines generate in ticket sales. Not Delta, or any major US carrier. As interesting as that sounds, it couldn't logically make sense and it only represents about 15% of Delta's revenue. It's not even a straightforward revenue stream, it works for profitability because they are able to book most of the revenue immediately and able to mark down the future expense because of how loyalty rewards are obligated.
It's really just a surprising morph of their economic model in the post regulation era.
You are not forced to play it. That is a just story you tell yourself. You can make a different choice.
That's a reason to have an airline credit card, it's not a reason to use it (other than for purchasing that airline's tickets)
Anyway, point is they failed and went under and my recollection is that just selling gasoline alone was not profitable. The extra coin comes from selling snacks, beer, smokes, etc.
And it was Swifty - definitely a no frills experiences!
Here is a decent video explaining it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
The $8.2billion from American express pays basically is buying tickets and ticket extra, it buys them some points, lets ignore multiples for now, it buys them 8.2billion points, which they give to customers which then buys tickets.
If Spirit accepts USDC instead it wouldn't be that much different.
Generally it's the interchange fees that fund reward programs (charged between banks), not the merchant fee.
https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/interchange-fees-101-wh...
It generally depends on the contract the merchant has with payment provider:
- some have relatively high merchant fees to cover for interchange fees
- others (generally called IC+) have the merchant pay the IC fee plus some other (generally much smaller) fee to the payment provider
In both cases it's the merchant that ends up paying them. It's not a concidence that in Europe (where there are caps to IC fees) the fees that merchants pay are generally lower.
this isn't unique to airlines. this applies to all exceptionally mature companies/industries who believe there is no more room for growth. any significant profit they make gets paid out as dividends to investors who then put the money elsewhere instead of reinvesting into the company
- People using devices without headphones
- People having loud phone calls on speakerphone with vulgar language
- People with bad body odor
- People looking to optimize their outcomes, even at the expense of others and net deleterious. (Speaking in numbers, willing to take +1 point of selfish outcome at the cost of several others' -1 leaving a net negative for the group)
So much this. I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
I had much worse experiences with Frontier and promised myself never to fly them again. On one occasion we had to wait for 2h on the plane on tarmac after landing at MacArthur airport because... the airport staff was not responding to pilots' calls. Somehow they didn't know the plane was landing. It was 1 AM or so and while it might not have been Frontier's fault, to not be able to sort it out for 2 hours was telling. Had other issues, too, this one was most ridiculous.
I liked Spirit, though, great cost savings, and I didn't mind the minor inconveniences that came with it.
Aside from being known for being a cheap airline, the brand itself was pretty solid... I think it had everything working to its advantage. The bright yellow exteriors of the planes, a catchy name. I think people knew exactly what Spirit was and what they offered, which is the sign of a good brand.
wait a minute... what if?
Talk about damning with faint praise
The only people surprised by Spirit were people who don't read warning labels and then you should only be surprised once. Heck, I paid 3$ for coffee on spirit but they would gladly bring refills and were proactive about almost like a restaurant. On AA and United, you usually had to go up and ask.
On top of that, you could get the big front seat (tm) which wasn't first class but pretty good about 150$ if you waited until your flight to bid. I got it a bunch and it came with free snacks and drinks and it was much cheaper than buying business
I'm gonna miss it.
This is exactly why I would never be caught dead on Spirit. Sartre got it right, "Hell is other people." My issue with Spirit and other budget airlines as a frequent traveler was never about the planes, the staff, or the operations, it was always the other passengers. It's bad enough dealing with people in general in the circumstances we all find ourselves in stuffed into an airplane, but budget airline travelers are generally exactly the sort of folks who ride the bus, which is why nobody wants to ride the bus in the US.
I say all this as someone who enjoys public transport when I'm in Europe and has no problem flying budget airlines in Europe like KLM Cityhopper or EuroWings, because everyone across society uses public transport and budget point airlines in Europe. In the US though, public transport and budget airlines are nearly only used by people who you'd rather not be stuck near for hours at a time for fear of being attacked, coughed on, or otherwise somehow harmed even if minimally which is entirely avoidable by just not.
I would rather deal with someone putting up their nasty leg on the chair next to me, or listen to a movie with speaker on for the whole flight, than deal with rude flight attendants that won't respond to my needs, or dirty looks from other passengers because I'm wearing something comfortable.
Aside from what I see on social media posts though, I've never seen anything extreme like that flying on spirit in all the years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/american-airlines-worst-...
Yeah it's not a secret that you can get by in life on the cheap if you have cheap, trashy tastes.
And you sort of made another point I had: people like you, and companies who cater to people like you come with all that haughty snobbishness that's just unpleasant and degrades the experience. Good taste has to do with appreciation of value and quality, not polishing of one's ego, or pretending you're superior to others.
> These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business.
For most businesses the size of Spirit Airlines, the owners typically do not operate the business. They pay people to do that. I don’t operate REI, even though I’m one of its many owners.
I've no idea if the proponents of this plan are reputable, but the concept reminds me of the early years of WestJet, when they made a big fuss about being employee owned and had (back then) a markedly better customer experience. For US residents reading this, I'm told they were a bit like Southwest Airlines.
Even if the naysayers are correct and the probability of this panning out is low, you'll never hit the pitches you don't swing at, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airli...
Like, all people in the world?
Customers? Employees?
What does this mean?
EDIT: It’s shareholders, but each person has one vote regardless of share count.
MEC was the only co-op I have ever been part of. I'm pretty sure they stopped being a co-op and sold it to private equity.
It sounds more like a credit union. (first $5 goes to your ownership share / vote, and the rest of your money goes to your account).
I'll lay out the specifics here from what I learned. I'm not convinced either way, yet, that it could work for an airline.
So here's the ownership structure:
- Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC) - produces fuel
- Federated Co-operatives (FCL) - owns the refinery, also owns food and agriculture distribution warehouses, negotiates bulk pricing
- 200-ish independent regional Co-ops jointly own FCL
The CRC is highly profitable. FCL is profitable. The independent regional co-ops are not, on their own, all individually profitable. Some of these exist in small rural centres, some of them exist in larger cities. The urban ones are generally profitable, the smaller ones not so much. The rural ones, though, are largely the lifebloods of their communities; it's not unusual for the Co-op Grocery Store and Co-op Gas Station to be the only sources of food and fuel for miles and miles. While these do sometimes run at a loss, they make up for it with their annual Patronage cheques from FCL: when the CRC makes a profit and when FCL makes a profit (from the CRC and from their distribution network), those profits get returned back to the member co-ops on a pro rata basis: buy more from FCL, get more at the end of the year.
At the far tail end, each of these independent co-ops is a member-owned co-op. At the end of the year I end up getting a patronage cheque based on how much fuel, food, and building supplies I bought that year. It's not large, but getting a $100 cheque in the mail is always nice :).
In this situation, though, it all works because the not-so-profitable pieces own both their upstream wholesalers and a crazy-profitable refinery. (The refinery sells to other customers outside of FCL as well).
One of the other critical pieces that the strike/lockout/overall "labour dispute" really made clear to everyone: the independent Co-ops, FCL, and the upstream CRC are all member-owned co-ops, not worker-owned co-ops.
---
So let's look at how an airline co-op might be structured. The first parallel that I could see would be flipping the regional airline model on its head; currently the big players like Delta and United run a bunch of their smaller routes through regionals (SkyWest, Republic, etc). If a bunch of them got together, they could in theory jointly one one of the majors. The wrinkle there, as others have pointed out, the majors aren't profitable as airlines, but rather through their credit cards and loyalty programs. Alternative, then? Do a bunch of regionals get together and buy a bank? Let the bank be profitable, let the major airline handle traffic between the regional hubs?
I know quite a bit less about worker-owned co-ops, but generally speaking aviation is incredibly capital intensive. Starting a worker-owned co-op airline is probably not possible. A single, say, 737 Max 8 costs $121M. That capital's gotta come from somewhere.
Spirit as an asset is worth less than $0. Buying it would be a commitment to set money on fire for a decade.
So, it's at least technically possible.
China is doing R&D on a partial-vacuum train (basically Musk's hyperloop thing) with a target of 1,243 mph[1]. That's probably a pipe dream, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
> The government should of [sic] bailed out Spirit instead.
I'd be okay with this if all the taxpayers were granted equal shares that their collective money could have purchased at an imputed no-bailout price.
0: L0 Series SCMaglev
1: T-Flight train
What's that saying about idle hands.
Jobs root people to their communities and give them purpose in life.
I can't fathom how this airline was allowed to keep existing.
Air France, British Airways, Finnair, Turkish Airlines, just to name a few, all have miles programs.
They just aren't tied to credit cards because the EU caps interchange fees to 0.3%, so there simply isn't enough money to have a meaningful credit card point system.
It suggests we'd be better of eliminating the absurdly high hidden taxes paid to the credit card companies, that in turn act to gamify the business. In the end they raise the cost of doing business, for virtually no benefit at all. It's a monopoly extracting as much wealth they can get away with.
The question at the heart of this: How can "the shining light on a hill" be so stupid? It's digging its own demise.
The whole point of airplanes is that they require no physical infrastructure between point A and point B.
You can have competing power companies generating the power if the grid is owned by the state (or a regulated monopoly). Coincidentally, that is a good mental model for airlines because airports are often state-owned or if not are highly regulated.
That's why the creditors let Spirit die. Their airport slots and gates are more valuable than the rest of the company combined.
So if they tend to compete themselves into oblivion, or need to turn into banks to subsidize their product, then it might make sense that they should be regulated monopolies.
Still you're probably right, if they can turn into banks and stay profitable, then maybe that's a better market outcome overall.
I pointed out the simple fact that Ryanair can't be considered a counterexample to airlines tending not to make money on flights since it relies on upsells to make a profit.
McDonalds -> leasing land to franchisees. Private equity -> saddling existing business with debt while chopping them up for parts. Stock markets -> pump and dumps. Selling anything -> rewards programs and branded CCs. Car dealerships -> captive audience for servicing. Owning real estate with the goal of leasing it out -> speculation on its value.
But just because it is made up doesn't mean it isn't real.
The "regulation vs. no regulation" stance is the wrong way to look at it. Airlines are still regulated, of course. Maybe some of the regulations we do have are unnecessary, some of the regulations we got rid of we should really bring back, and perhaps there are others that we never had that we need.
My guess is MANY more people fly and are able to afford to fly vs before. There are probably many others things that changed.
It's also very nice to fly.... in first class.
I wonder if this will be the next "market" to exploit if ad revenue ever dies down too much, or if it's one that's always been there, and I've simply never been a part of.
From skimming, I see at least 5 places where this is reiterated on the page.
It sounds like there’s a problem with having too many flights that are barely full and hence unprofitable. AFAIK the federal gov spends significant money subsidising many “small airport” routes even if they’re barely used.
Spirit and the other LCC’s problem is that the legacy airlines are now offering a similar product in their basic economy that has less hassle, higher frequency, is sometimes eligible for earnings on their massive loyalty programs, etc.
(Seattle is my home airport, so maybe this has something to do with it - but come on, SEA is no ORD or ATL...)
But also, 'Not necessary' doesn't mean 'not worth subsidizing'.
If you think the government finds value in having a connected population with easy access to information then there's value in subsidizing that. Assume the government valued it at $10 a month per person due to increased economic activity made possible from the information flowing, if the market price for it was $60 a month then you have expanded access to anyone who valued it at at least $50 a month.
You can make the same argument for air travel by the way. Why does the government value consumers flying around the country? Why would the government want to encourage people to fly from Charlotte to Florida to go to disney instead of drive to Pidgeon Forge and go to Dollywood? Or fly to NY 3x a year to see grandma for a weekend instead of drive to NY and see grandma for a whole week 1x a year?
Be sure to actually go read the read the contracts and what they contain.
See perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative
Fidelity is still better in some metrics, however.
However, if you wait till your competition goes broke, you need to ensure you survive long enough and stay big enough so you don't get bought. That's not exactly easy.
It's not the same as buying a new car. The legal requirements for maintenance of commercial aircraft is an order of magnitude more substantial.
Tickets used to cost 4-8x what they cost now, depending on route. It wasn't a couple percent extra. A lot of what made flying seem like such a glamorous activity was that everyone but the upper classes was excluded.
An economy class round trip from the US to Japan in the 1970s with Pan-Am was $8,900 in 2026 dollars. About $15,000 if you flew first class.
Deregulation also allowed international carriers to sell to us too. An ANA round-trip on economy class is a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Their business class is similarly cheaper than Delta One.
Air travel is so much cheaper than it was back then that it is affordable for most people to take one international trip a year if they really want to. Even to exotic places in Asia or Southern Europe.
If you offer me the same price for flying than for taking the high speed train, I'll take the train every time.
In practice it'll take less travel time, no security lines or theater (no problem bringing your water bottle or whatever), you can bring more luggage, you can stand up/walk/visit the bar during the trip, you go from city center to city center so you don't have to spend an extra in taxis... I just arrive there 20-30 minutes before the train leaves and that's all.
Regulations are usually introduced when people realize that the very efficient corporate choice like 'cancel underbooked flights, sell as many tickets as we can for each flight and bump the lowest paying passengers at boarding time' really screws over passengers. In the US, this is accompanied by giant waterfalls of public money being spent on the infrastructure required by airlines to cover the overhead that is mandated, like airports and air traffic controllers.
Why are you being hoodwinked by this?
Are you thinking worker co-op or member co-op?
What's your point?
Did airlines get cheaper due to deregulation or because technology and engineering made operating them cheaper?
I always wondered who paid for that.
You mean every laboring slave.
No free market means corporations are allowed to engage in slavery, chattel or otherwise. Let's be honest about what a free market actually is. Factory towns, lifetime debt bondage.
You could just as well say that if it weren't for private investors nothing and nobody would exist, because they also have their fingers involved everywhere.
But the post I'm replying to is a scenario of a different world. We're not discussing how things actually are and how things actually happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project#Free_Town_P...
Also, any evidence or reason to believe that an extraction-based capitalist model is more aligned with customer interests (where the customer is the thing value is extracted from, and where corporate leadership salaries are directly tied to how much they can grift from the customers) than a government where the incentive is to get the maximum number of happy fliers to vote for you?
Or the government may want to give their airline unfair advantages, which would decrease real competition and create a brittle industry. Or the government might want to strangle their own company, in order to declare that it is “bad and dumb” in order to manufacture popular support to privatize the public company.
Customers hated them. They were top examples of when public management fails. They were expensive for the customers and costed the tax payers billions to be kept alive, and basically everyone rejoiced when they were let go (Alitalia being reborn as ITA Airways and effectively operated by Lufthansa, Malev just disappeared).
The problem with state run enterprises is that the accountability to voters is very removed. You elect parliament and government which chooses some administrator at random times which chooses some managers etc..
It's not impossible to do well (many state run companies are fine!) but it's hardly a guarantee.
Just recently HN discussed the „ban anonymity on the internet“ initiatives of various governments and who was behind it because nobody wants that. Certainly not the citizens.
Focusing strictly on shareholders (value) has been en vogue since the 1970s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
Before that the general thinking was along the lines of:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory
Somehow companies managed to survive and grow before the 1970s.
It's been in vogue, in circles, since the 17th century. We're not talking about for-profit structures here.
Why did people buy stock then?
If you assume there is an airplane — great, run the airline for the customers and employees. But the cost of the airplane can’t be handwaved away.
A modest regulated profit could result in a healthier industry-- one where the least economic hiccup doesn't cause carriers to shut down with limited notice, where they can afford to not play chicken with hours-of-service laws and maintenance standards, and where people don't get promotions for trying to sell the idea of standing-room tickets.
I don’t understand how higher profits would translate to a less miserable experience. Nice experiences are available now! You just have to pay for them. All regulation would do is remove the option of not paying for them. If you want to pay more for a better experience, nothing is stopping you now.
The fact that the airline that just went under was one of the most miserable, most nickel-and-diming ones out there suggests that this isn’t actually the way to compete, and the market does allow for some room at the bottom there.
Don't know where I read that, but it seems apropos.
You're subsidizing everyone else if you're not trying to get the best loyalty program.
Quite the mentality...
You’re taking a 2%+ loss on every purchase if you’re not playing the game. But you better carry debit cards and cash because some vendors charge extra for credit cards, and some charge extra for using cards at all!
And you are wasting so much time on small gains.
Refusing to play is the best strategy here.
One could make an argument that "Well look, it was costing the government taxpayer money!", and that's a valid point. But given how little the variation in prices are across airlines in India, it's similar to saying "The govt shouldn't do public transport if it loses money, even if society gains".
"Investor heterogeneity" is a thing.
There is no Platonic "shareholder" with one set of needs.
What's your source for this? I take this flight a lot and I find it hard to believe it's more than 5.5-5.75 on average. Looking at the last few weeks for one of them[0] supports my experience.
Maybe your number has TSA/airport time included.
When the vacuum fails - mechanical failure, human error, natural disaster, attack - air is going to rush into the tube. The speed of sound is how fast air molecules move, so train doing 1243mph might hit into a wall of air coming the other way at 767mph for a 2000mph collision. Don't think "wind isn't that fast", think vacuum implosion[1][2]. The weight of 60+ miles of atmosphere pushing down trying to force air into the tunnel. The principle that moves atmospheric steam engines. The train will then be blown backwards into the train coming behind it for another 1000mph+ collision.
This will be the Hindenburg of the Hyperloop.
According to Gemini this hypothetical train would take about 18 hours.
It would also cost hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade to build.
Doesn't do much for seeing Uncle John next Tuesday.
I like trains. I like them a lot. But they don't work over long distances. Particular when you have dozens of state and city jurisdictions to cross.
Each of them get a vote.
Honestly I'd be happy just to have quality HSR on the East Coast. Boston to Richmond takes like 12 hours right now.
Maybe the West Coast could get a Seattle to San Diego route.
You just described the building of the interstate highway system, but I doubt there’s a person alive who would say it wasn’t worthwhile.
I fear Americans are simple to selfish to have any desire to do time consuming expensive things that will improve their country long term. They just want benefits for themselves , now.
Meanwhile, the government could announce a bailout of Spirit tonight.
Wouldn't take nearly as much effort.
This is absolutely not true. If all the airlines were prohibited from making money with anything else (miles, credit cards) then airfares would rise across the board and there would still be plenty of demand. Not as much, but still plenty.
That's.... like a pretty shocking erasure of the idea of a demand curve given the forum here.
To be glib: no, that's not how it works. Increase the price and fewer people will fly, but the demand won't drop to zero. Decrease it and you make less money per ticket but the size of the market is bigger. At some point there is a local maximum, to which the market seeks.
But conditions change occasionally and the equivalent supply curve is moving rapidly because of the oil shock (i.e. it's more expensive to put planes in the air to service tickets you already sold). And things like the mess with Spirit are what happens when the market readjusts: the rest of the industry will (probably) backfill some of the lost capacity, but not all of it, and prices will (probably) rise a bit to a new equilibrium.
I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so, judging by both Amtrak ridership statistics and the cost ineffective nature of my attempts to travel on it.
People and goods have travelled around the world long for thousands of years before air air travel and train travel. And people have made decisions above the trade-offs of travel to see family for thousands of years before air travel and train travel.
If air travel was unavailable or unsubsidized, people would continue to make those decisions and life would go on.
I'd love to take some HSR to Austin or Houston or San Antonio from DFW, but I just can't imagine the network to make a train work competitively to get from DFW to NYC or LAX.
But that's a contradiction. If they are valuable, their customers would pay more for their services - that's the definition of valuable. And if their customers would pay more, they could afford higher air fees.
If air travel didn't exist, I likely wouldn't move around the globe at all. Hell, I wouldn't move around the country even.
In the US, roads are mostly publicly-owned (the ultimate subsidy). Local bus and rail transit is usually also publicly-owned, though when it isn't, it's done through public-private partnership and/or subsidy. Regional and long-distance rail is subsidized. Why shouldn't air travel follow the pattern?
There kind of is. I can make it from here in Bucharest to Paris in about 3 hours by plane, while by car I'll need about 3 days (i.e. two sleepovers till I get there). This is magical to me. To say nothing of places like the Arabian peninsula or, I don't know, the Indian subcontinent, I wouldn't even think of getting there by car as it is close to impossible (at least when it comes to a land-route to India), but taking a plane is a 6-hour flight from nearby Istanbul to Delhi.
Btw you don't need to completely disregard other modes of transport to appreciate bus :)
Of course, we can argue that there are network effects or natural monopoly effects for fixed infrastructure like roads and rails, and thus there must be a public role. However policy rarely seems to remain at this reasonable position and instead quickly expands into something altogether different.
Indeed! We don't need air travel when we have perfectly good teams of oxen and covered wagons. We could even hunt and forage for our food along the way to save some money!
Would love to compare the economic throughput in raw dollars of the Oregon trail vs a single flight route.
Don't forget that the whole point of transportation under capitalism is enabling and stimulating economic activity. So sure, get rid of the airlines if you want to collapse a bunch of economic activity. Personally I'd hope for it to get replaced by high speed rail, but kinda hard to do that when economic activity is highly depressed.
Like what?
Nearly all 'goods' are going to travel more efficiently by rail and truck. And I say nearly all to cover the outliers like maybe an organ flying across country for transplant.
So if it's not the distribution method of choice for goods, then leisure? It's probably a global positive if people fly less. People will end up going to more local vacation destinations instead of aggregating all of those resources into a few popular locations that end up being massively overcrowded. This in turn reduces carbon impact because driving 3 hours is significantly less impactful than flying for 3 hours.
If you are just talking about all of the labor that has built up to support this inefficient and wasteful enterprise, that's probably for the best to reallocate that labor elsewhere. It will happen eventually, unless you think cheap oil is a permamenent feature, so why not happen sooner than later?
The masses are mostly inert, elites and counter elites move the needle. Those who can manufacture consent win.
Yeah! They're doing their best! They definitely aren't fascist stooges trying to expand the surveillance state.
Good ol Zoidberg once again says “why not both?”
If you don’t fix anything else until healthcare is fixed, you’ll be fixing nothing until the end of time
Yes, and it really, really sucked back then. And the number of people who could actually do that travel was much, much smaller than today. Air travel (and train travel, to some extent, though it mostly sucks in the US) has enabled people to travel around the globe who never would have been able to in the past.
What a bizarre argument.
Aren't all modes of transportation in the US either subsidized or public-owned to some degree? We haven't arbitrarily picked one; we picked them all.
Air travel is maybe the least subsidized, though? Essential Air Service is probably the main thing? Long-distance bus like Greyhound is only minimally subsidized too.
But local transit (bus & rail), and regional and long-distance rail are all subsidized or publicly owned in the US. Most roads are publicly-owned, either locally or by the federal government. Long-distance bus and rail are actually unusual in how little they're subsidized.
A car with no gas could still be used to store stuff, or even roll downhill. A car with no land can’t be used at all for anything. And the amount of land required increases with the square of the velocity you want to travel out. But we never add that in.
As far as air travel, I haven’t done the math, but I suspect if you were to add up just the foregone property tax revenue associated with the land underneath the airports you’d end up with some pretty serious numbers.
Anyways, my basic point all of this is the same – we should be careful about subsidies because they tend to distort incentives and decision-making, whether we apply them to airplanes or horse buggies. It doesn’t mean that there’s no place for government involvement in transport, simply that we ought to be wise to the side effects and externalities. I could buy that the government should be involved in air travel, but I part ways with the idea that this should be extended such that if people get used cheap fares on Spirit then the government should guarantee Spirit operation forever. Maybe Spirit was just an anomaly, and we’ll be fine when it’s gone? Some people might fly a little less, some people will just eat the difference and not care, some people will take the bus, some people will buy a car. It’s all just normal people making normal trade-offs about decisions in their life.
Person 1. "Airline service is more valuable than people will pay for, it's a genuine force multiplier that is unaffordable without being subsidized"
Person 2. "Airlines are not magical, people and goods will move another way, so it doesn't need subsidy".
You: "Airlines are magical. Those things cannot happen another way."
There's three conclusions for what you think: 1) that airlines are special and magical and doing something which cannot be done another way, but that has no value and airlines can go away. That's incoherent. 2) Airlines are both affordable and profitable. That doesn't seem to be true and needs some supporting. 3) Airlines are doing something uniquely 'magically' valuable, they are not profitable, then they need subsidising.
My statement is correcting a fact (descriptive) not proposing what to do about it (I.e. not prescriptive).
It’s very hard to imagine what the world would look like without subsidized air travel. I have to think long and hard to figure out if subsidies would actually be sensible for something like this. I can be convinced either way right now, but it would take a lot of good historical data on something very similar, perhaps has to be specifically air travel in countries that do and don’t subsidize it, and their economic outcomes, controlled for other factors.
But saying that air travel is somehow the same in kind as other kinds of travel is incredibly shallow and reductive. We get to travel orders of magnitude faster and to places we wouldn’t even be able to reach otherwise.
But that's hard to do, because for many people/uses, they have to use those roads to get done what they need to do. The alternatives (like high speed rail) just largely don't exist in the US, or are painfully sub-par.
About the former: when you drive on the road, you cause congestion for other road users. But having the roads at all (and having them used) also causes externalities for others, who ain't on the road. Like cutting up nature or noise.
About the timespans:
In the very short term, demand for specific roads is inelastic: if you live in one place and work in another, you have to commute.
But over several years demand for specific roads is very elastic: people and jobs can and do move.
(And no, the market often does not provide.)
The core part of air travel doesn’t really feel any different to a bus or metro or train. Off the tarmac then yes it absolutely feels like a Verizon store, as does some of the in-flight service, but there’s always been this weird feeling as a traveler that every carrier is basically the same thing but with different decals on it. Airline alliances are surely the ultimate example of this.
It very much is a different experience than flying a legacy domestic mainline carrier. I’m not alone amongst people i know who will happily fly the cheap seats on United/Delta/AA but won’t even look at a ticket from Spirit or Frontier even at a significant discount.
Compare it to a flag carrier like Singapore air and it is a shockingly different product.
All that’s an aside: we know what regulated airlines look like since we already tried it, much more expensive, with airlines competing not on price but on amenities.
I’ve not flown them and stick to Alaska and the local puddle jumpers to get off the island.
Never flown one of these, can you describe the difference? Hard agree about what you said about the others.
Worse yet, you buy a ticket for carrier A, then discover that due to xyz partnership agreement you are actually flying on carrier B.
In other words, do we need to make sure everyone can afford to take a flight somewhere?
Or is air travel a luxury that we can allow the market to set a price for?
Maybe flights are simply too cheap, and we should just allow airlines to fail, which will limit supply enough to bring ticket prices back up to a level that is sustainable for airlines as a business.
Of course, this means that a lot of people are going to be priced out of being able to fly places for non-essential reasons. Which, given the environmental impact, might not be a bad thing, although it will make life very different for most people.
Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.
Try flying Delta. It isn’t the cheapest option, but you really do get better service.
If you want to feel special, do Aeromexico first class. The checked bags are waiting for you before you can even walk there on a domestic flight.
Spirit was cheap. And if you’re poor, you need cheap. If you aren’t, buy better service and don’t complain that it’s just Greyhound on a plane.
As long as the required crew of flight attendants doesn't assault me, I've never really got off a plane thinking anything at all about the service. Just "where do I need to go next" or "I'm glad to be home".
Not arguing against your point, but it astounds me how many airports do not have water-bottle refill stations. My home airport (SFO) does, but many in the US still do not. I feel like that sort of thing should be legally mandated, given we're not permitted to bring water through security. The paltry amount of water they give you on the flight (and at times of their choosing, not yours) is not enough to rehydrate basically anyone.
But I guess I also don't fly much, and I never had to deal with delays or rebooking with them.
The cost of EU passenger rights payouts is vanishingly small on the average ticket if almost all of them arrive as advertised.
Can you enumerate these? As far as I'm aware Ryan Air is basically more "Spirit" than Spirit Airlines.
Also, look at Ryan Air (and Wizz Air) fares. They are consistently the lowest cost per kilometer travelled anywhere in Europe. Sure, it is like a flying bus, but it gets the job done, much cheaper than anything the US.
Now what is vital? Is Spirit vital? That’s the hard to define part.
The angle of treating transportation as regulated utility shifts the business focus away from profit onto providing services, which sometimes can cost more than your income. Similarly, would you close schools, because they didnt make enough money? Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
Whether or not you solve this through regulation, that's up to you.
The first scenario it harms us by under-serving and scammy practices, the second scenario it’s over-extractive and funneling money from the many to the few.
"No one is riding the trains! We need more money."
I'm not sure it's great to have important infrastructure operated this way. Other than regulation do you see a way out?
Hacker News has become simple minded. It's embarassing.
This doesn't seem to be a antitrust issue at all, it looks like it was one company bailing out another.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
“Our win in court is a victory for U.S. travelers who deserve lower prices and better choices,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “We fought this case to protect consumers who, as the court recognized, ‘otherwise would have no voice.’ I am incredibly proud of the Antitrust Division’s team and our state law enforcement partners’ tireless advocacy.”
US mainline carriers try to get the high end travellers in first class, while also trying to run an ultra low cost carrier with the new "basic" class tickets. They end up doing a mediocre job at both by not hitting the level of service that Asian airlines provide, and not having the low prices that the Ryanair's of the world give you.
Which of the two was the Air Canada experience?
We were clearly in line before their deadline, were certainly going to make it to the gate before they even opened for boarding, had no checked bags, and they made us buy new tickets. The cherry on top was that they ran flights every hour, so we bought the ticket for the next hour but the gate agent let us on the original flight we had- so they basically just forced us to pay double for our flight.
I'm not against regulation, I think there are areas where it's needed (privacy is a good example), but it is fire, and fire should only be played with when you really need it because it can easily grow out of control and burn things you don't intend to get burned.
Yes, of course. We should separate school and state.
> Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
How are they highly subsidized? And where? Perhaps we should fix that, instead of adding to the problem? Two wrongs don't make a right.
Though I admit heavily taxing education on account of negative externalities is tempting.
Your comments are one-line thoughtless mic-drops, the system is working.
> "If a service cannot be provided for a cost below what someone will pay, the service should not be provided as providing that service is a lose-lose situation."
It can be a win-win situation, not everything is about profit. See also:
> "How did poor people who needed to fly fly when flying was expensive?"
If a poor person can fly somewhere to get a better job, they stop being a poor person. That's a win for them personally, and a win for society, and a win for future government tax income. It's also a win for the airline which moved them and got paid for it. The only time it's not a win is if you have a myopic focus on "but it costs money now and that's bad".
The service on the plane isn’t a big deal, but in my experience strongly resembles the service off it.
2. "We won't pay for this, but we still want to have it!"
These are of course both fair points. Why should we "pay for" things, what's that all about? We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want, supplied by pixies.
If the airline goes bankrupt, that just means that the creditors get less than they otherwise expected. That's something to haggle out between creditors and management and shareholders.
(Or do you want to imply that if the shareholders saved money on CEO compensation, they would give the money to ordinary workers?)
Edit: maybe a piñata is a better metaphor. :(
Is this how you see roads? Are we entitled for wanting those to be paid for by the state? What about the police? Should we have to pay whenever a police officer stops a mugging -- or is the wage of that officer, too, supplied by pixies?
https://web.archive.org/web/20040603010444/http://awdal.com/...
So obviously there are theories about how these things can be privately funded. But I can never remember the theories. Looking at that link, it was going to be toll roads. People dislike this, understandably. One problem with private roads is that you can't exactly use a competing road, which might entail moving house, or changing your plans for the day, or your job.
I have a vague notion that roads could be funded by a group of businesses that benefit from them, sort of like the W3C or a mall. Non-profit, sponsored roads, or something. (Now I'm thinking of runestones, several of which are near bridges and say "He made this bridge for his soul" or a similar statement.)
Don't ask me about police, I don't even understand crime and punishment, really.
I should maybe add that I meant "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible. There are no pixies to magically know the answers, to my regret, only governments, and they only pretend to know. By buying and selling we can almost figure out the answers, contingently and approximately, but a lot goes wrong with that, including the friction of having to do it all the time, and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...
[2]: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/no-accountab...
Look what it took to wrangle the cigarette industry. Look how unfettered gambling is ripping through the USA.
Or look at industries pre-regulation. Meat, building construction, medicine...
At minimum we have as much evidence that "the market" is capable of being as bad as "bad regulation."
> Or look at industries pre-regulation. Meat, building construction, medicine...
You might like to read about what economists call 'Normal Goods': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_good
> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
Health and safety are normal goods. As people get richer, they demand more of them.
One other difference I can think of is that carry-ons are more rarely included in the base fare in the budget airlines than the legacy airlines, though maybe that has also gone away since the changes where bags must be included in the listed price that Southwest pushed for.
I’m not from the US and have never flown any of the airlines being discussed here.
I’ve never heard of this, is there some YouTube videos you can point me to.
United even has commercials before the safety video; combined with the "if you're watching explicit content on this flight, please mind the children" announcement, those flights onestly honestly felt pretty surreal to me.
The cabin crew stand at the front of the plane, and either play a recording or make an announcement saying you can buy a lottery scratchcard for €2 or whatever, with some of the money going to charity. They then walk down the plane "scratchards? scratchcards?"
They repeat this with a collection for charity (no scratchcard), a promoted drink, and some sort of food.
I think this is mostly unique to Ryanair (in Europe), I don't remember Wizz Air, Norwegian or EasyJet doing this. Part of Ryanair's marketing is to make the experience worse than it needs to be, so you know you're saving money.
Spirit or another super-low-cost? They don't have the extra air frames and number of flights to do that. You get to wait even longer, losing valuable vacation days (or missing work meetings).
First, as someone with relatively long thighs, I literally don't fit in their sardine can seats. But more relevant to most people, while things may be OK if everything goes perfectly and nothing is delayed or cancelled, you are completely SOL with Spirit/Frontier if something goes wrong (and "something" may just be they themselves decide to cancel an undersold flight at the last minute). It's nearly impossible to get someone to talk to, I feel like the employees know how shitty their companies are so they all have an attitude like they DGAF, and it's a mad (expensive) scramble to find alternative arrangements at the last minute.
I've never had as abysmal experiences as I've had on Frontier compared to any other airline.
But it's great they are not regulated utilities. Because either everyone would have to pay for extra legroom, even if they don't need it, or some freakishly long people would not be able to pay for the extra legroom that they need.
I don't pay a flat fee for my water, electricity, or gas usage, regardless of how much I use. I pay for the gallons, kWh, and therms I actually use. (Yes, there are other fees on those bills, but my usage actually matters.)
Airline regulation doesn't have to specify standardized seat pitch, etc.
I have no difficulty believing you when it comes to customer service. I’ve never had any issues requiring anything beyond the most basic customer service, so I just haven’t been exposed to differences between airlines in that regard. I also understand that a bad experience can leave an exceptionally bad impression. I suppose the only thing that might surprise me is if the higher-cost airlines don’t also have terrible service.
I still avoided them like the plague because the legacy carriers are selling you operational performance and the ability to usually get you where you're going within a reasonable timeframe if you're delayed or canceled. Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, whoever else, do not do nearly as good a job when something goes wrong. Although they should get a lot of credit - none of them have ever had a fatal crash.
Yes, if you ignore the part where things are different, it's basically the same. Trouble is, those differences do meaningfully make a difference. There's no objective measure for misery and happiness, but flying Jsx is nicer than Spirit. You can put a dollar value on misery, that's why one's so much more expensive than the other.
Also, here in Europe, traditional aircraft carriers have been migrating their quality towards bottom end (ie Swiss not giving any beers for free even on intercontinental flights, microscopic legroom also on intercontinental) while for example Easyjet is for me at this point a high quality reliable carrier with no bullshit. Ryanair is a dumpste3r but luckily they don't serve my nearest airport well.
And planes are also fairly fungible: when one airline goes bankrupt, another airline can quickly snatch up the planes and fly them.
There's no fundamental rule of a capitalist society that consumers have to make their choices out a narrow selection of options provided by corporate oligarchies between the criteria they would prefer to compete on. As a customer, I can choose which airline I want based on whatever criteria I want. Maybe I pick it based on pay ratio between executives and average workers, maybe I pick it based on whichever has the font I like best on their homepage.
In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.
Everybody benefits from roads. People who use the roads directly, benefit from being able to move around quickly. Companies which move raw materials around to make products benefit from roads. People who buy products that were moved and delivered by road are benefitting. People who can work because roads enable tourists to come, benefit from them. People whose decent coworkers were once children who were educated by teachers who got to work by road, are benefitting years later. People whose family members didn't suffer a massive property loss because they could call a plumber who got there by road, are benefitting. People who can engage in long distance trade and relationships by post, benefit.
Even though there are people harmed by roads, there's nobody who doesn't benefit from roads.
We have ways to charge people-who-use-roads-more, more money; they pay larger road tax for commercial vehicles, for larger wheelbase vehicles, for larger engine vehicles, they pay more fuel tax because they drive further and buy more fuel, they pay more tax on parts and labour because they wear out their vehicles faster, replace parts and vehicles more often, spend more on mechanic work.
I also don't really want it so that a business owns private roads, and if the road gets a sinkhole and traffic cannot flow, the business can just shrug. If ambulances can't get through, if garbage collection can't happen, if people can't get to work, if companies can't deliver products, the company doesn't have to hurry to fix it. They only care to the extent that their toll income has dropped by one road's worth, but if they fix it within a month or two that might be fast enough for them - but not fast enough for the rest of us to avoid serious consequences.
Good regulation doesn’t completely avoid market mechanisms it tries to tame the more brutal ones in order to maximize return to society. The roads argument is important because without roads we do not have any trade. So by collectively and somewhat proportionally, to use and income, managing the cost of road it makes everything else the market does possible.
Maybe you mean that in desperate situations - such as working out what to do about roads - we might as well resort to government. We do, so I guess you're right.
"The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth." This is in opposition to profit-seeking, where "entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Friend, with respect, the mental blocks you're coming up against regarding roads, police, and resource distribution, within an American libertarian framework, are outlining exactly why American libertarianism (unregulated capitalism) is an untenable ideology.
Private roads don't make sense in capitalist framing because there's no possibility of competition - no market for a free hand to move in. Furthermore, there's ethical issues around the fact that roads won't be built to people who aren't as instrumentally valuable to capitalism, which is in opposition to the idea that all humans are equally intrinsically valuable. In plain words: poor people won't get roads built to them, won't be able to work, will get poorer. This is bad, and if you want to just be selfish about it, will lead to crime and social discohesion.
This argument extends to all the resources governments typically involve themselves in: electricity, sewage, water. We have direct evidence that when they try to privatize these things, it goes horribly wrong: see, the American healthcare industry, or, what's happening to the UK as it privatizes sewage. See the Texas privatized power grid.
All capitalist entities (corporations) are simple algorithms: Make profit go up. We like to tell ourselves that making profit go up is possibly only through mutually beneficial trades, aka the aformentioned profit-seeking, however that's not true in practice. The most profitable activity is slavery driven labor, and the most profitable state for a corporation to be in is monopoly. All optimized capitalist behavior selects for and trends towards that activity and that state, and literally the only way to stop this is through establishing some kind of hierarchy that allows for the limiting of corporate behavior - governments, and regulations.
Any example you give of a corporation in capitalism not trending towards slavery or monopoly has one of several explanations. 1. It's regulated, 2. It's led by someone who ethically doesn't want to trend towards slavery or monopoly, or isn't intelligent enough to do so. In the case of 2, that company will eventually be surpassed and consumed by someone with less morals, more intelligence, and more capital (more power).
> "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible.
I completely agree, and there are other ways to do this other than capitalism, regulated or otherwise. I strongly recommend the most cited economist in history: Karl Marx. Peter Kropotkin is also very good, "The Conquest of Bread" is a great speculation of alternative systems.
The flight attendant also makes an announcement about the United-branded credit cards near the beginning of the flight.
But this is really just an illustration of what the top-poster of this thread said: flying people places doesn't make enough money, so they have to pursue other revenue streams.
Does it not make enough money for viability, or does it not make enough money for sociopath types in C-suites?
If it’s the latter, there will never be enough money for them and will keep pushing increasingly absurd customer-milking initiatives.
United is the closest, with only a 0.04¢ loss on every seat mile.[1] the other airlines lose 1-2¢/mile.
The jets are a loss leader for credit cards.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-airlines-lost-money-flyin...
[1] There's two metrics airlines report: Cost per Available Seat Mile and Passenger Revenue per Available Seat Mile.
This is the cost/revenue for flying a seat, which may or may not be occupied by a person, to a destination. If the seat is empty it gets $0 in revenue but still costs money.
You can calculate the profit made from selling tickets per seat mile by PRASM - CASM.
The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?
If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.
I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.
...while other low-cost carriers try to distinguish themselves by not being quite as bad as Ryanair.
Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.
I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.
Generally I agree with your view that Ryanair is decent at what it does, but COVID refunds happened only after the regulator stepped in to threaten them over their original "no refunds" and then "refund in the form of a voucher, with a short expiry date on it" policies actually being unlawful, and even allowing for the scale of its operations it received more complaints to the UK CAA than anyone else about refund handling during COVID.
Literally how regulators should work. They look at the outrageous things they try to do and make laws to prevent them. It’s worked very well and also hasn’t ended Ryanair (which is the usual anti regulation argument , that we can’t have cheap things with regulations).
I personally never fly Ryanair because I’ve had to sue them (and won) in the past, they really do suck.
"Wizz; Not the worst airline you've ever flown on"
After they made this change years ago, they said so explicitly in their marketing around continuous improvement.
They have an entire theory of marketing based on people believing that "if it feels cheap, it is cheap", and so they deliberately build in a bunch of annoyances (scratchcards, arbitrary baggage restrictions, checkout hoop-jumping, endless PR about removing toilets or running standing-only flights) which serve to make their service seem as cheap and nasty as possible.
And it works: some people simply ignore the nasty aspects, others are willing to put up with them in order to get a bargain, and yet others actually take pride in wading through the crap - usually expressing it in "I beat the system" terms. And here we are talking about it on a barely-related thread - carrying their marketing message further!