Former Spirit flight attendant details days since airline’s collapse
A former Spirit Airlines flight attendant found out about the carrier’s impending closure from the news media last Friday, he told the Star-Telegram.
The airline, which had an operating base at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, shut down last Saturday after negotiations with the federal government on a $500 million bailout package collapsed.
About 17,000 employees lost their jobs at once, with nearly 1,000 of them in Texas, according to the Houston Chronicle. The number includes 119 pilots and 246 flight attendants who worked at DFW, and 393 employees who worked at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.
Twenty flights out of DFW were canceled in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown, according to FlightAware.
Spirit operated out of the airport’s Terminal E and brought 1.35 million passengers through the doors last fiscal year, according to the airport’s annual fiscal report.
The flight attendant, who asked that his name be withheld over concerns about securing future employment, said company leaders did not communicate with affected employees until about 45 minutes before the airline ceased operations early May 2.
“In recent weeks, global geopolitical tensions have driven a sharp and sustained increase in fuel prices,” Spirit CEO Dave Davis wrote in an email to employees Saturday. “This has materially impacted our financial position, and we have reached a point where we cannot continue to operate.”
To continue operating, the business would’ve required “hundreds of millions” of dollars that Spirit “did not have and could not procure,” even with the government’s help, Davis wrote.
The attendant, who was in Boston on company business, said he found out about his imminent unemployment via phone from a friend who did not work for the airline.
“I answer, and he’s like, ‘Oh my god, are you OK? The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Spirit is going to shut down tonight,’” the attendant said. Even the Spirit flight attendants’ union, the Association of Flight Attendants, found out about the closure from media reports, he said.
“I texted a union rep that I know, and he was like ‘we’re just hearing about it from the news, we’re trying to figure it out,” the attendant said.
Negotiations were still in progress at that time and continued “down to the wire,” the former attendant said, but union representatives advised employees to start getting their financial affairs in order.
After the airline shuttered and all its flights were canceled, the attendant was left to find his own way home from Boston, he said.
“The company had told the union they had budgeted money to get everyone home, and the union told us also that if they didn’t do that, the union had funds to get everybody home,” he said.
Still, though, the attendant said he and others booked their own travel separate from the company because they were unsure how long their badges would allow them access to flight benefits and crew areas of the airport.
“We wanted to get through security before that happened… so we just booked the first flight home on JetBlue at like, 6 a.m.,” the attendant said.
“While the country has had a blast making Spirit the butt of the joke, we’ve built a strength together that could withstand anything that anyone throws at us,” union representatives wrote in a statement May 2.
The same day, the union’s international president published a letter to the Departments of Labor and Transportation, in part urging the agencies to “deploy the full capacity of the federal government to support these workers, who have abruptly lost their income, healthcare, and livelihoods.”
For the flight attendant, the airline was more than a job. Spirit allowed him access to travel benefits, and his nine years of experience with the airline made for an incredibly flexible work schedule and his choice of flights and off days.
“It gets in your blood,” he said. “Oh my God, I’m gonna miss it so much.”
While other airlines, including DFW-based American Airlines, have already voiced their readiness to help affected Spirit employees find new jobs, the attendant said he’s concerned about the amount of time it may take to get hired elsewhere, and how starting over at the bottom will impact his quality of life.
“I’m going to be taking a huge pay cut, I’m going to be, like, working every holiday, I’m probably going to have to move,” he said. “The saddest part is the friendships. That’s what made me cry the most when we flew out of Boston.”
