Spirit Airlines’ shutdown this month has put more than 17,000 employees out of work, including 643 in Michigan.
According to a WARN notice filed May 2 — the day Spirit abruptly ceased operations —with the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, those laid off included 321 flight attendants, 91 captains, 86 first officers, 53 senior technicians, and many other corporate and administrative staff members.
One of the laid-off flight attendants, Cindy Williams of Monroe, said she felt blindsided by the shutdown of the carrier where she worked for 27 years.
“It was a total shock on May 2 at 3 a.m. to know that we had closed our doors,” Williams, 67, said. It just felt like everything we’d built in that 27 years was gone: our health insurance benefits, flying benefits.”
The Fort Lauderdale-based carrier, founded in Macomb County as a small charter company in the 1980s known as Charter One, struggled for years with financial problems and filed for bankruptcy in November 2024 and again in August 2025.
As jet fuel costs spiked this spring amid the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Spirit’s leaders warned the airline was in danger of failing and sought a $500 million bailout from the federal government. When bondholders rejected the plan, the carrier said it was left with no choice but to shut down.
Spirit served about 1.7 million passengers at Detroit Metro Airport last year, ranking a distant second to Delta Air Lines.
mjohnson@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Spirit Airlines’ collapse put hundreds out of work in Michigan
Reporting by Myesha Johnson, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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