Spirit Airlines and the Death of Leisure for the Non-Leisure Class

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.After Spirit Airlines ceased operations, in the middle of the night on May 2nd, a series of canary-yellow airplanes sat on the tarmac at Newark Airport, arranged neatly like children’s toys at day’s end. Travellers flying in or out of the hub ogled the spectacle, a display of sudden corporate collapse. Now that the airline is officially dead, following one failed government bailout and a couple of failed mergers, seventeen thousand workers are in need of employment, and thousands of customers await refunds. Meanwhile, Spirit’s jets are being ferried, one by one, to the desert—a storage field at Goodyear Airport, in Arizona, where they await their fate. What was leased will be repossessed to recover debt in bankruptcy court. What was old will be scrapped and sold for parts. What is functional will be recouped by competitors that will benefit from the death of this icon of budget air travel, which facilitated a kind of low-grade freedom for the masses.

Spirit dying, or getting itself killed, is another episode in the protracted crisis of aviation this season. The feeling is one of precarity; the act of flying, which had retained that glint of preciously guarded leisure activity, is now a microcosm of the tumult of the Trump Administration. Should we tabulate the events? The Administration’s cowboy capture of the Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd, prompted an airspace closure in the Caribbean, stranding many populations, none as humbled as the American tourists, gone to the islands for rest and relaxation over the winter holiday. Airports themselves, liminal spaces that, normally, are pleasantly severed from the lurches of the world, spun out, too. After ICE and C.B.P. agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, House Democrats forced a partial government shutdown, halting the flow of funds to the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Transportation Security Administration. Agents, forced to work without pay, called in sick; security lines metastasized, sometimes snaking out to the curb. In a bid to restore order, Donald Trump planted ICE agents, some of whom were in plainclothes, at major airports; in San Francisco, two agents in athletic zip-ups forced a mother to the ground, arresting her while passengers heckled the officers and her young daughter wailed. More recently, the war in Iran, and the resulting exorbitant increases in fuel costs, threaten to make flying prohibitively expensive for many, and have made it much harder to reach certain destinations.

The consumer finds herself a dupe. Planning air travel, she does not have an idea of what to expect. Spirit flaunted a low-cost model, with some domestic flights costing less than a cab to the airport. The experience was purely, aggressively functional. From Point A to Point B. Although Spirit had a few American competitors in the budget space, such as Frontier and Southwest, it was the one among them that had a cultural lore. If Pan American Airways represented, at its height, victory and suavity, the country achieving a kind of European state of grace, then Spirit was the exact opposite—synonymous with the rowdy and the rude at the heart of the American character. After the closure was announced, every single late-night-show host paid their respects to an accidental muse of Americana. “This is the worst news for my writers since they fixed LaGuardia,” Seth Meyers complained. “If the Mets start winning, we might have to put them on a psychiatric hold.”