Spirit Airlines attorney Marshall Huebner stood before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane in a White Plains, N.Y., courtroom on Tuesday morning and apologized to the American public for the budget carrier's sudden shutdown, blaming a jet-fuel "megaspike" tied to the Iran war and warning that consumers will pay billions of dollars more a year for plane tickets in Spirit's absence.
"Thank you, and sorry to the American public," Huebner told the court, according to NBC News. He said the fuel spike was projected to add hundreds of millions of dollars to Spirit's liquidity needs for the year, and predicted that "Americans will soon be paying a billion, or two or three, dollars a year for plane tickets in the aftermath."
What the court heard
Tuesday's hearing follows Saturday's pre-dawn shutdown, which canceled every remaining Spirit flight and put roughly 17,000 jobs at risk after talks with the Trump administration on a $500 million cash infusion in exchange for a significant potential stake collapsed amid disagreements inside the administration over the wisdom of funding the bailout, NPR reported. Huebner told the judge Spirit carried more than 50,000 passengers on its final flights Friday and returned all crew members to their home bases by Sunday night.
He also described the collapse of the talks as having "almost made the impossible possible" before falling apart. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said over the weekend the government did not "have half a billion dollars laying around."
The Florida layoffs
NBC News obtained a letter Spirit sent Saturday to roughly 4,000 Florida employees informing them their jobs were gone with immediate effect. "This layoff will be permanent, and the Company's operations at the locations will permanently cease," wrote Suzanne Solon, Spirit's vice president of human resources. Solon said advance notice would have "precluded the Company from obtaining the capital needed" to avoid the closures.
Spirit had filed for Chapter 11 protection in November 2024 and again in August 2025, when it reported $8.1 billion in debts against $8.6 billion in assets. The carrier had lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020.
The counterpoint
Huebner's framing — that the Iran-war fuel shock pushed an otherwise viable airline over the edge — is contested. Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, told the Associated Press that the Trump administration shares responsibility for the collapse, calling the president's decision to strike Iran "bad foreign policy" and pointing to the blocked 2023 JetBlue acquisition and a structural loss of cost advantage to legacy carriers that adopted basic-economy fares. "They were already in trouble," DeHaven said. Industry economists also note the warning of $1 billion to $3 billion in annual fare increases is hard to square with Spirit's shrinking footprint: the airline held a 3.9 percent share of U.S. passengers in February, down from 5.1 percent a year earlier, and flew about 1.7 million domestic passengers that month, roughly half a million fewer than the year before.
The next courtroom dates in White Plains will determine the pace of the wind-down and the order in which creditors are paid. Spirit said it will automatically refund flights booked on credit or debit cards; passengers who paid with vouchers, credit or points will have to wait through the bankruptcy process.