Some of my favorite reading is about business, how it forms, who invents it, and in this case, what happens when it dies. Bloomberg has a great story about the death of Spirit Airlines, the first “instant death” example in the industry since PanAm, 35 years ago. (More recent bankruptcies have all been absorbed by other carriers.)
Spirit was on a knife’s edge up until the war with Iran started, and the sudden increase in jet fuel pricing made the entire business untenable. Not that it hadn’t been living on borrowed time up to than point, really.
There’s the story of the crews all being “out of position” and having to find their way home, the planes (almost all of which belong to leasing companies) being hotfooted out of airports to avoid storage fees by pilots found among the ranks of the newly unemployed - and in many cases plane carcasses being disassembled (the jet engines, owned separately from the planes, are worth many times what the actual aircraft is), and so on.
Anyway, a story I enjoyed: