Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, April 25, 2026
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8 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Man, I almost didn’t know what day it was without the new open forum. 😉
We are negotiating with Iran! Actually, we’re not! Yes, we are!
That’s your news summary for this weekend.
US military doctrines:
1990s Air-land war.
2000s Shock and awe
2020s Whine and complain.
I watched Kimmel’s roast of the Orange Ass, and I highly recommend it.
Spoiler alert: he doesn’t stop with El Taco.
Then again, he had a target-rich environment.
Moving the discussion on Spirit and El taco to today’s forum.
One thing people misunderstand about airlines is the nature of their assets. You see fleets of hundreds of planes, each worth tens to hundreds of millions. Thing is, most of those planes don’t belong to the airline. they belong to a lessor that leases them to the airline. If the airline is liquidated, the leased planes go back to the lessors.
Spirit’s fleet is about 130 planes. I’d be surprised if as many as 40 were owned by the airline*.
What’s more valuable than that is the highly trained personnel, from cabin crew to mechanics, the airport slots, the frequent flier program, the credit card affiliation, and maybe some routes.
Spirit isn’t a big airline in the country where it operates. Meaning it would be targeted for merger or takeover by airlines of similar size. JetBlue and Frontier seemed to have moved on. airlines like the big 4 (United, American, Delta, and Southwest), would rather buy pieces of Spirit at liquidation proceedings. And they’d rather hire laid off staff as new hires without seniority, which allows for a very small salary.
* I forget how big Mexicana’s fleet was when it went kaput in 2010. But I vividly recall reading only 9 of their planes were owned by the airline. The rest were leased.
@Kathy:
The fleet size was 69 planes.
@Kathy:
In the late 1990’s, I worked for a billionaire who decided he wanted to own a film and TV production company. Worked for him under a one year contract, helping him get the company off the ground – which was merely a vanity project for his wife.
At the time, his net worth was in the vicinity of 2.8 Billion. He made his fortune buying the jets from Airbus and Boein and leasing them to the American, United, KLM, British Airways, etc, etc, becoming the single biggest owner of jets in world. It was a very good business.
Sadly he lost most of his fortune after selling his company to AIG in an all stock transaction before the company’s stock value dropped 90% in the late 2000’s. But it’s relative. He’s still worth 300-400 million.
@CSK:
Thank you. For some reason, I remembered more…