From the Spirit Effect to the Spirit Dilemma
Key takeaways
- Budget-conscious passengers, many of them young, formed a seemingly endless security line snaking around the rotunda, which features a twelve-foot-high mural depicting the history of flight.
- The history of commercial aviation runs through the Marine Air Terminal.
- Rattner argued that Donald Trump was acting without a proper plan, and that saving Spirit would defy the free-market principle that failing companies should be allowed to go out of business.
Budget-conscious passengers, many of them young, formed a seemingly endless security line snaking around the rotunda, which features a twelve-foot-high mural depicting the history of flight. When I arrived the other morning, the rotunda was quiet and empty, apart from a lone security guard, as were the adjoining café and the check-in area. The only sign of life was an electronic arrivals screen, which showed the arrival times of flights from Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Myrtle Beach, and Detroit. Next to each flight listing was the word “CANCELLED.” Someone must have forgotten to disconnect the screen after Spirit abruptly shut down on May 2nd, following the abandonment of a federal rescue effort.
The history of commercial aviation runs through the Marine Air Terminal. Opened in 1940, the Art Deco building, which was designed by William Delano, originally served Pan Am’s fleet of transcontinental propeller-powered seaplanes—Boeing 314 Clippers—which took off and landed on the nearby Bowery Bay. After jets replaced prop planes for long-haul routes in the late nineteen-forties and fifties, the terminal served small planes and nonscheduled flights until the mid-eighties, when Pan Am converted it to house the company’s popular shuttle service, operating between New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston. After Pan Am went out of business, in 1991, Delta took over the service. The shuttle catered to business travellers, myself included, when I worked in Washington decades ago. Eventually, Delta switched the shuttle to one of the main terminals, and in 2021 Spirit moved into the Marine Air Terminal, bringing its bright-yellow livery and ultra-discount business model with it.
In some quarters, the closure of Spirit has been called inevitable, and even desirable. “Let Spirit liquidate and add its tombstone to the airline graveyard,” Steven Rattner, a Wall Street financier and former Obama Administration official, wrote in the Times a few days before Spirit did go under. Rattner argued that Donald Trump was acting without a proper plan, and that saving Spirit would defy the free-market principle that failing companies should be allowed to go out of business. The airline was heavily indebted, and it hadn’t turned a profit since before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024-25, it filed for bankruptcy protection twice. Earlier this year, it was hoping to emerge from court supervision, with plans to slim down and return to profit in 2027.