Detroit – From airline workers to passengers, the abrupt shutdown of Spirit Airlines left everyone Local 4 spoke with stunned and scrambling.
The budget carrier announced Saturday it was ceasing operations after 34 years in business. The airlines, which had gone through bankruptcy before, shut down as the company said it couldn’t keep up with higher oil prices.
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Its final flight departed Detroit and landed in Dallas, ending a decades-long run that made Spirit a major player in the low-cost travel market.
Flight attendants who suddenly found themselves out of work and families who discovered their flights were canceled at the last minute all shared a similar frustration, they wish they had been given a warning.
One of those families is the Domka’s. They spent the week on vacation in Orlando and were scheduled to fly home Saturday on a Spirit flight that was supposed to leave around 4:30 p.m.
Instead, they woke up Saturday morning to a cancellation notice.
“It was kind of nerve-wracking, I mean I guess would be the best way to put it,” said Derek Domka. “It was like, ‘Ah, crap, what do we do?’”
With Spirit shut down, the Domkas quickly started checking prices for other flights home. Derek said for a family of four, the cost would have been steep. They decided instead to rent a car and drive back to Michigan.
Local 4 spoke with Derek as his wife drove the family through Atlanta.
“We’re trying to make the best of it,” he said. “Like I said, we’ve got the two kids. So, we’re driving home, we’re going to get to see the mountains, stuff they normally wouldn’t see.”
The last-minute nature of the shutdown blindsided not only passengers but Spirit employees as well.
“I woke up at 10 a.m., looked at my phone, turned it on, and I got so many messages, emails, Facebook was blowing up that Spirit had shut down,” Karen Donald a Spirit flight attendant of nine years. “There was a huge range of emotions.”
Donald said she was on a layover in Atlanta when she learned the airline was no longer operating. To get home, she had to fly on another airline, Frontier.
By Saturday evening, she had gathered with several other now-former Spirit employees at a colleague’s home. They shared memories of their time with the airline and tried to process what comes next.
“This is who we see every day,” Barbara Upmeyer, a former flight attendant said. “We’re in the same hotel, we’re not going to have that anymore.”
For some, the future feels especially uncertain.
“I’m numb and don’t know how to process this,” Ryan Seidel, a former flight attendant, said. He who worked for Spirit for 29 years.
“I’m still processing,” said former flight attendant Bruce Heckbert. “How do you go and apply for unemployment? The only other time I’ve been unemployed was in the ’90s.”
Upmeyer, Seidel and Heckbert said they found out they were without a job at 2:16 this morning. That’s when they received an email from the company saying it was shutting down.
They also mentioned they spent the rest of the day trying to gather their important documents from the company website, because they were informed they would no longer have access after today.
And all of the employees we spoke with said they’re hopeful for the future even if it may seem uncertain right now.