Spirit Files Bankruptcy Plan

Spirit filed its restructuring and reorganization plan with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, and it’s highlight is a further effort to reduce the size of its fleet. When Spirit filed for this bankruptcy last year, it had 214 aircraft in its fleet. It expects to be down to as few as 76 planes by Q3 to cement its cost savings. While most industry insiders believe the savings will come from selling the planes that were owned, rejecting leases on others, and not having to deal with maintenance or upkeep, a Spirit insider told Cranky the real savings will come in the form of needing less yellow paint.

The carrier says it expects to start adding planes back to its fleet between 2027 and 2030 which is a comically long window of time, with the caveat it’ll be done “commensurate with profitable growth opportunties.” The next time Spirit finds a profitable growth opportunity will be the first in a very long time.

It says its debt and lease obligations will be down to just $2 billion after the reorg, down from a whopping $7.2 billion when it initiated this bankruptcy process.

Who’s Got the Power? Not Denver

Denver International Airport located in Denver near Denver about halfway between Denver and Nebraska has had a bad go of it for more than a year with its trains breaking down on a semi-regular basis leaving passengers backed to the TSA checkpoints and beyond. The airport had a new one this week — the power went out Wednesday at about 9:20 a.m. MT paralyzing the airport’s entire operation.

Supposedly the outage was caused by a “piece of equipment shutting off” at a nearby Xcel Energy substation, but we’ve received reports that Blucifer, the Blue Demon horse living on the airport grounds, was seen near the main electric input at the time of the outage.

Power remained out for just short of two hours, coming back on around 11am. A ground stop was issued at 9:54am that stayed in effect until 11:30am, causing cascading delays and cancellations all day. Luckily for some AAirlines, passengers barely noticed the power outage, having come to the airport expecting a delay or cancellation.

Delta Makes its Baggage Guarantee Harder to Redeem

Delta’s enhancement team is back at it again, enhancing its 20-minute bag guarantee to require submission from passengers no more than two hours after their flight arrives. Before this change, passengers had 72 hours to file a claim, but its now been shrunk to two.

It’s one of those things where Delta will probably save a little bit on customers who forget to file amongst the chaos that is baggage claim, but how is this worth it? The payout is 2,500 SkyMiles, and our Cranky Valuation Machine ™ prices 2,500 SkyMiles at approximately 14 cents. This was a deal with passengers that the airline values our time — at least a little bit — and it made this token gesture when it didn’t live up to its own expectations.

Unlike a Medallion devaluation or price increase, this change is unlikely to result in public uproar. Most travelers probably don’t even know this exists, and those that do can’t exactly be getting rich off 20-minute bag guarantee arbitrage opportunities. It seems as if the bean counters on Virginia Ave bean counted a little too hard on this one. Keep climbing, friends.

Frontier Adds Four New Frontiers

Frontier Airlines will launch four new routes in May and June, in what feels like its first route announcement that didn’t involve Atlanta in several months.

Beginning May 5, it will operate 1x daily between Dallas/DFW and Newark, proving that airlines will try literally anything to get customers to go to Newark. On May 21, it’s two more for Frontier, including 4x weekly DFW-Orange County and 1x daily Fort Lauderdale – Washington/Dulles. Lastly on June 11, it will start 4x weekly service between Las Vegas and Nashville.

These are all somewhat crowded routes, with AA, Spirit, and United flying DFW-EWR; Southwest and Spirit on BNA-LAS; AA flying DFW-SNA; and UA running FLL-IAD.

Lufthansa Dives Into the Basic Premium Class Pool

Lufthansa is finally joining the Basic Business club with the new fare class debuting across each Lufthansa Group carrier: Austrian, Brussels, Discover, Lufthansa, and SWISS. It’s not just business class getting basicfied as it will enhance its offerings with Basic Premium Economy fares as well. Just to be clear, it’s not calling them basic, it’s calling them light. Because light fares test better than Basic. But we know.

What’s included? One checked bag (down from two), a charge to select your seat prior to check-in, increased change fees, a cone of shame to wear around your neck during boarding, and a DB rail pass on trains guaranteed to be late (spoiler alert: that’s all of them.)

To begin, the basic fares in premium cabins are available on flights to and from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Excluded are flights to North America, China, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore… for now.

• American‘s app will now give more detail into delays and cancellations, and it should work well seeing as it’s had a lot to work with during testing. The airline is currently workshopping a new slogan: “American, you’ll still be late, but you’ll have a little more information.”
• Air Tahiti Nui is weighing A350s and A321XLRs. Must take a big scale.
• Andes Líneas Aérenas is seeking permission to fly World Cup charter flights to the United States.
• Breeze will be blowing into Costa Rica.
• BA is beefing up its winter schedule for pale Brits who want to go literally anywhere else in winter.
• Cathay Group posted a $1.8 billion profit for the full year 2025.
• Congo Airways likely has some leadership changes coming.
• Ethiopian will resume non-stop service to Atlanta on May 21 after putting in a temporary suspension beginning in February.
• Finnair is suspending flights to Doha (through March 29) and Dubai (through July 2).
• Gol really scored with its new Rio de Janeiro/GIG and Orlando service that will operate 4x weekly.
• LATAM would like to grow.
• Ryanair opened a fancy new maintenance hangar in Madrid.
• SWISS is offering a bonus to any full-time FAs that voluntarily leave the airline by the end of this summer.
• t’way Air s’cured $17 million in shareholder backing.
• United unveiled the new B737-8 MAX to be based in Guam. The aircraft was seen buying sunscreen and a panama hat to prepare for the move.
• Wizz Air is adding a 4th airplane to its Venice base.

I set my Wi-Fi password to 2444666668888888 so that when guests ask me for the password I can tell them it’s just ‘12345678’