'Left With Nothing': Former Spirit Workers Respond to Sudden Shutdown
Left without health insurance, flying perks and no job was a sudden reality for many Spirit Airlines employees over the weekend.
Employees like Cindy Williams, a 27-year flight attendant, said they felt the sting of the shutdown.
"I really feel that we built that airline and we lost it all in a day and are left with nothing," said Williams of Monroe, Michigan.
Bankrupt discount carrier Spirit Airlines ceased operation Saturday.
An already vulnerable discount-fare airline felt added pressure and financial strain as jet fuel prices rose due to the Middle East war. The airline filed for a second Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and laid off hundreds of employees in October 2025.
Spirit hoped for a $500 million federal government bailout but the funding effort proved unsuccessful.
Spirit employees say all they can do is shed tears, share memories and hope for new beginnings.
MORE: Spirit Airlines says refunds have been issued to most of its customers
Spirit ranked No. 2 in terms of passengers carried at Detroit Metro Airport and flew around 1.7 million people in 2025. The closure will cost thousands of jobs.
Although the company has weathered storms like the 9-11 attacks and COVID-19 pandemic, Williams, who was planning to retire from the airline in two to five years, was surprised the company could not push through current economic challenges as it had before.
"I was so devastated. I did not think that we'd close our doors. I felt that we were strong enough that that would not happen. It was a total shock on May 2 at 3 a.m. to know that we had closed our doors. It just felt like everything we'd built in that 27 years was gone: our health insurance benefits, flying benefits," said Williams, 67.
A spokesperson for Spirit Airlines said as of Sunday afternoon, 1,500 crew members were returned home and a majority of passengers were refunded for flights. The company did not provide information on next steps for employees. It referred employees and travelers to spiritrestructuring.com.
The closure felt like a gut punch, said former flight attendant Dahlia Fountain of West Palm Beach, Florida.
"We got no notice, no heads up, no emails, no 'brace, brace, brace,' which is our command. We had no managerial awareness or direction of what's going on and where we're going, nothing, just sudden; an overnight thing, out of the blue," said Fountain, 41. "I felt like my whole world was snatched from my hand."
Pivoting from an "office in the skies" or even finding work at another airline after 11 years at Spirit is hard to make sense of, Fountain said.
She'd built her career up to an off-reserve flight attendant making $50 hour.
"To start over ... to $20 something or $30 something ... you're going to be on-call. ... I have a new baby," Fountain said. "They could take you to Australia tomorrow, they could send you to the Maldives. ... You're really at their mercy when you're on reserve."
So, the closure leaves employees wondering what could be next.
No U.S. carrier of Spirit's size — it accounted for 5% of U.S. flights at one point — has liquidated in two decades. Spirit helped keep fares lower in markets where it competed against major carriers.
Kenyetta Jeffries of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, started her aviation career at a flight attendant for the airline in her home state of Michigan. That was in 1999, when she was in her late 20s. She touted the airline's family-like culture for allowing her to bring her newborn daughter, Grace, also known as the "spirit baby," to work when she could not find child care.
"I was there under the original owner and founder," said Jefferies, 55. "I ended up with a career because of Spirit that was never even on my radar. I retired from the industry just before the pandemic. It gave me a career, helped me to raise my children and I was heartbroken to hear everything that was happening.
"To see that they just couldn't pull through, I just was heartbroken. I have friends that fly on the line and I thought about them and their families," she said.
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