Spirit to Transition Its Model to Fly Only on Peak Travel Days

In the post-pandemic world, airlines have been struggling to figure out how to deal with the massive variability in demand by day-of-week. Every airline has been forced to make adjustments, but now Spirit is going one step further. It will stop flying on off-peak days entirely.

Just recently, Spirit began to transition to this plan. In June of 2024, off-peak days operated at 95 percent of the peak day departure numbers for the airline. But this June, the airline reduced off-peak days to flying at less than 60 percent of peak-day departures. Take a look at this chart we used in Cranky Network Weekly on March 23.

The schedule after mid-June has yet to be finalized, but we have received reports that it will be similar for the rest of this summer. But by the end of the year, Spirit is planning on ending flying on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday entirely.

This might sound like an Allegiant-style of operation, and indeed Allegiant used to sit its entire fleet on Wednesdays back in the day. It continues to fly less on off-peak days than it does on peak days with huge variability, but it no longer regularly parks the fleet completely. Here is a look at my recent EKG Allegiant’s departures by day:

Of course, Spirit’s model is different than Allegiant’s in one important way. Allegiant has always focused on cheap airplanes. Low capital costs means it can sit airplanes and not have to worry about hustling to make revenue to pay for pricey assets.

Spirit has new, expensive airplanes which it has to pay for. If it sits airplanes on three of the seven days of the week, how is it supposed to pay those astronomical lease rates? It has a plan.

In 2023, Spirit had operated its airplanes an average of 11.1 hours per day. That dropped to 9.9 hours per day in 2024 thanks to the Pratt & Whitney engine problems. Just assume that going forward Spirit wants to be at about 11 hours per day. I spoke with CEO Ted Christie, and I’ll let him take it from here:

If we want to fly 11 hours a day, that means 77 hours per week, per airplane. If we choose to fly only four days a week, then we only need to fly 19.25 hours per day on the other four days to reach our utilization goal. We can do that!

Spirit’s idea is to have all crews and aircraft ready to depart exactly at 12:01am on a peak day. It will then fly like crazy all day long with no breaks until the last arrival comes after midnight. Those late arrivals are ok, says Ted.

We can fudge a little here, because people don’t look at when the flight arrives. Our research shows that people just want to travel on Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. So, the last flight of the day will always leave at the end of those days. Who cares when it lands?

To help further improve utilization, Spirit will be looking to fly longer-haul flights that require less downtime. Again, Ted:

Think about it. If that flight leaves LA at 12:01am and flies to Denver, it is going to land 2 hours later then take awhile before we can prod everyone off the airplane and then get new Guests back on. I need to fly 10 of those flights per peak day to get to my goal.

But if that flight goes to Burlington, Vermont? It’ll fly for 5 hours before we have to let people off. I just need to fly four flights of that length. Look for a lot more long flights since our latest turnaround plan — Project Charlie — focuses entirely on peak-day utilization.

Ted also explained that he saw real benefits to this model. After all, maintenance work can be done on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, keeping the fleet fit for flight the other days. And Saturday? It’ll be a wildcard. Ted says he expects significant charter work might be a possibility on those days.

He’s received requests for quotes down to El Salvador from “many people” as of late. (The entity requesting the charters — which he would not name — has said it is very appreciative of the torture-inspired layout on Spirit’s fleet.)

I struggle with this plan, and I pushed back on Ted, saying that I think there would probably be more people looking to fly at 5pm on a Tuesday than 12:01am on a Thursday, but he brushed me aside.

Listen. Do you run an airline? I didn’t think so. Our customers are telling us what they want, even though we long ago asked them to stop doing that. But Frontier doesn’t think we’re worth the $30 billion price tag we want in a merger, so half our team was bored with nothing to do. They decided to pay attention to customers just to get some laughs, but now it’s created a goldmine for us.

He also pointed to the airline’s new premium strategy as a way to win over a tidal wave of new travelers on those peak travel days. “We’ve thought of everything. We’ve even upgraded our onboard liquor. We now source our Buzzballz from the Bâllz region of France where they grow only the finest grapes for that purple drink.”

This hardly seems like a winning strategy to me, but Ted said it didn’t really matter and that they were just waiting for Frontier to buy them anyway. “Might as well have a little fun in the meantime. Am I right?”

To that, I could only say… Happy April Fools’ Day!