Don't be. This merger being blocked means JetBlue now won't acquire Spirit at an inflated valuation. Instead when the company is liquidated they can buy the airport slots they so direly need without all the extra debt -and- they get to pick through anything else they want like airframes. So your favourite airline will likely get everything it wants (seems like they were willing to pay more than Frontier anyway) with nothing it doesn't. The only downside is they have to wait for bankruptcy proceedings which are about 4-6 quarters away looking at Spirits run-rate and revenue projections.

However you should be sad in general because this is a terrible judgement that dooms a business from taking the only way out that would have been a reasonable outcome for its employees, shareholders and users.

> Instead when the company is liquidated they can buy the airport slots they so direly need without all the extra debt -and- they get to pick through anything else they want like airframes

I'm not familiar with how the process works, would JetBlue now have to compete with larger airlines for these assets if Spirit goes under?

Yes but this is likely still better than acquiring Spirits considerable debt load etc. The most likely competitor will actually be Frontier who also made an offer on Spirit. The big players generally have the allocations they are after already, hence their position in the market being so solid.

There is a risk of the big 4 just buying the slots to tie them up though, this happens a lot in markets like Australia which have very strict arrival/departure windows but is a lesser problem in markets like the US which throttle throughput based on ATC capacity instead.

We had 14 regional / internal to the US airlines in the 80's. We had 10 airlines in the '00's. We have basically 4 or 6 national / regional airlines now.

"JetBlue's biggest problem remains their access to airports, if they were able to get more access to that they would likely be a serious threat to the bigger airlines."

That is like 'Their political party is cheating, we need to cheat bigger to win". That is leaning in to making the situation more and more rigged, more and more of a failed market / system.

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to go read about how less players in a market bad for competition. Matt Stoller is a good place to start.

JetBlue can bid for slots at an airport, like anyone else. If bigger airlines are blocking them, lets fix that market to be competitive, NOT "let's help the market degrade into Oligopoly faster".

The market has already degraded into oligopoly. Spirit and/or JetBlue folding will only make that worse.

This seems to be a common theme in politics. A bad decision was made by the previous generation. Now the current generation, seeing that the decision was bad, makes decisions that should have been made in the first place. The problem now is that the bad decisions have already been made, and what at one point would've been a good decision is now either exacerbating the problems caused by the bad decisions or is at best failing to remedy them.

It comes up a lot in healthcare and immigration for example. What constitutes good policy is highly conditional on the current state of the world.

What were the reasons for that consolidation? Was it just simply that a small airline is not economically viable or is it a push for larger airlines?

Considering the talk around Spirit being on the verge of bankruptcy it seems like it may be a mix of the 2 and the first one being an important part of this conversation.

just saying lets fix the market while ignoring that there is a problem with the market with a potential thing to address part of it right in front of us is just passing on the problem until we have the perfect solution.

That perfect solution may not be viable or may be many years away for a variety of problems (not the least of which being just a space problem at airports).

We have a bad tendency to try to get the perfect solution to a problem which stops us from having anything.