This Airline Is Shrinking Its Network After Bankruptcy. Here’s What’s Changing

The company plans to emerge stronger in the coming months.

BY AVA LEVINSON, NEWS WRITER

(Photo via Getty Images)

After filing for bankruptcy in August, Spirit Airlines is making moves to come back stronger… and smaller. The discount airline reached an agreement with its lenders to cut flights and aircrafts to place focus on high-demand travel periods and routes. 

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court announced the changes on Tuesday, stating that the airline will emphasize flights to and from its major Florida airports, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, and from New York and Detroit, CEO Dave Davis told CNBC. The company expects to emerge from bankruptcy in late spring or early summer.

The aircrafts flying separate from those primary airports “will be an even smaller part of the network,” Davis said. 

Davis didn’t expand on which specific routes Spirit would drop, except for some to Latin America because of a decline in demand. Still, the area will remain important to the company.

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Company Restructuring

Under the new plan, the airline will optimize its schedule to fly more during peak hours and less when travel is slow. Spirit said the move will help cut on spending, and its debt and lease payments will fall to $2.1 billion from $7.4 billion. 

The updated fleet will include older airbus planes “with the potential rejection of additional high cost NEO aircraft,” Marshall Huebner, Spirit’s lawyer, said at a hearing, meaning the newer Airbus A320 planes.

The annual cost of the fleet would decrease by another $550 million, a drop of 65 percent from pre bankruptcy filing. The company also said it had identified another $300 million in savings from non-fleet cuts, according to Huebner.

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