New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor.
As with many risky ventures, the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a larger one. So it is with the employees, owners, creditors and ticket holders of Spirit Airlines after the company abruptly ceased all operations in their recent financial crash landing.
With daily flights around the country to and from Columbus, Cleveland and Akron/Canton, tens of thousands of Buckeye travelers and thousands of airline and supplier employees will experience the turbulence from the company’s collapse. And as usual, the chattering class immediately began blaming the Trump administration, held aloft by evidence more fragile than the wax wings of Icarus.
So, why did Spirit fail?
The company blamed the sudden rise in fuel prices resulting from hostilities with Iran.
This excuse ignores numerous other airlines that are still flying high despite the higher costs for Jet A fuel.
Prices also weren’t responsible for Spirit’s two bankruptcy filings in the 18 months prior. Those facts didn’t stop myriad partisan commentators from blaming the Trump administration for stranded travelers and the loss of jobs.
One of the reasons traveling in a winged tube seven miles above the ground at nearly the speed of sound is so safe today is because of a culture that focuses on root cause analysis when things go wrong. In this case, the root cause of Spirit’s metaphoric crash rests with the Biden administration’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland and Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.
It was their abuse of federal anti-trust regulations that doomed Spirit by blocking the merger with its larger competitor JetBlue in 2024.
Turning back to making a small fortune from a large one in aviation, it bears noting that in the entire post-WWII history of commercial aviation, the industry is notable for frequent boom and bust cycles so severe that its cumulative net profits hover near zero. Such is the allure of aviation that entrepreneurs are willing to risk it all to prove they can beat the odds.
The aviation business is hard enough without the heavy hand of government central planners thinking they know better.
The real culprits
The Biden administration’s argument against the Spirit-JetBlue merger was predicated on the hypothetical anti-competitive cost to consumers from the loss of Spirit’s low-cost fares.
The companies obviously failed to convince the judge reviewing the deal for antitrust violations that the cost of Spirit’s collapse without the merger would hurt consumers even more. But that’s exactly what happened.
In a rational world, the progressive pols who championed and cheered the government’s meddling would acknowledge their complicity in what followed. Instead, they’ve doubled down, pointing to the Reagan-appointed judge and, of course, Trump’s high fuel costs rather than their own economic pilot error.
The Trump administration then mishandled the controls with an ill-advised 11th-hour bid to save the airline. Markets are always a better judge of business winners and losers than government will ever be.
As a pilot for 35 years and a business owner for most of that time, I understand both domains. The politicians who killed Spirit understood neither of them.
I’ll miss crossing paths in the sky with Spirit’s big yellow Airbus airplanes packed with excited and sometimes nervous passengers evincing school buses packed with similarly enthusiastic students on their own journey. I’ll also miss hearing the radio chatter with air traffic control using the “Spiritwings” call sign that always reminded me of the spirit that draws so many of us to aviation in the first place.
Of course the real losses will be felt by the thousands of Spirit and supplier employees who’ll be missing their paychecks.
New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a retired business owner. He was a two-term member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. He is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor. Reach him at philderrowdispatch@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: You can’t blame ‘Trump’s war’ for death of Spirit Airlines. Biden did it. | Opinion
Reporting by Philip Derrow, Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
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