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Spirit's Collapse, $111 Oil & JetBlue's Fort Lauderdale Surge | Ep. 1
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Spirit Airlines is gone, Brent crude has topped $111 a barrel, and JetBlue just launched 11 new routes to fill the void — aviation's fuel crisis is sorting winners from losers fast. Today's briefing covers Spirit's fatal budget miscalculation, the Strait of Hormuz fuel shock, UK slot rule changes, and O'Hare's $1.45B expansion defying the chaos.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Spirit Airlines budgeted two dollars and twenty-four cents per gallon of jet fuel. They were paying four dollars and fifty-one cents.
The fuel story isn't just a Spirit story. It's a global story with a single source: the Iran conflict and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The UK government moved quickly. New rules now allow airlines to merge flights and temporarily return slots without losing them.
JetBlue's response to Spirit's collapse was immediate. Eleven new routes launching from Fort Lauderdale starting July ninth, six of them entirely new markets.
One counterintuitive data point worth holding onto: Chicago O'Hare just hit a vertical construction milestone on its new Concourse D. Nineteen gates, five hundred and eighty thousand square feet, a one point four five billion dollar investment in narrow-body capacity.
The pressure points to monitor are straightforward. Watch whether any other highly leveraged budget carriers start showing Spirit-like margin stress.
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