A nickel and dime pioneer went broke. That’s not good news

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Like a leash implies a dog, an airline ticket implies a seat on a plane. Not so with America’s Spirit Airlines. Its “seats” were really stress position devices, designed to hold customers knees near their faces with no more padding for their backs than a public bus shelter bench.

Everything else was extra: checked baggage, cabin baggage, food, even water.

But no one will get to experience such mistreatment any more. This month, Spirit went broke for the second time, and stopped flying.

The immediate cause of death was high fuel prices, but the structural problem is that its nickel and dime model had gone entirely mainstream in the years since it debuted the approach in the early 2000s. There was no point flying Spirit when a major airline would offer just as cheap seats (almost; they are padded after all) and then sting customers for everything........

© The Sydney Morning Herald