Just after midnight Saturday morning, Spirit Airlines flight NK1833 from Detroit was on final approach to Dallas-Fort Worth. According to CBS News, the cockpit asked the tower a question.

"Is there any other Spirit flights coming in after us?"

The controller paused. "I don't see anything. So you might be the last one."

A few minutes later, the controller came back over the radio. "Well, it was a pleasure working with you guys, and I wish you the best."

"Thank you very much," the pilot said.

That was the last Spirit Airlines flight. At three a.m. Eastern, the airline ceased operations after thirty-four years. Seventeen thousand workers cleared their lockers in a single news cycle. Pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, gate agents, baggage handlers, schedulers, customer service reps. Spirit was the first major American airline in twenty-five years to go out of business for financial reasons.

How does an airline that carried tens of millions of people every year end with a tower controller saying "you might be the last one"?

The Funeral Was Saturday. The Death Was Sixteen Months Ago.

The Trump administration spent the final week negotiating a five-hundred-million-dollar rescue. Bondholders could not agree on terms. The deal collapsed Friday afternoon. Whether the federal government should have bailed out a private airline is a fair question for a different column.

This column is about how Spirit got to the point where a federal bailout was the only option.

Seventeen thousand workers (fourteen thousand Spirit employees and roughly three thousand contractors) lost their paychecks, their health insurance, and in many cases the only career they had ever known.

The timeline is public record.

In March 2023, the Justice Department sued to block the JetBlue-Spirit $3.8 billion merger. It was the first major U.S. airline merger a federal court blocked in decades.

In June 2023, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's department filed an unprecedented public statement supporting the lawsuit. Buttigieg told CNN the department had "generally not gotten involved in these merger cases, but that's changing today."

In January 2024, Judge William Young blocked the merger. JetBlue terminated the acquisition that March. Spirit filed Chapter 11 in November 2024. Spirit filed a second Chapter 11 in August 2025. On May 2, 2026, the airline ceased operations.

The funeral was Saturday. The death was January 16, 2024.

What "a Biden Win for Flyers" Looks Like

In a March 2024 X post, Senator Elizabeth Warren cheered the result:

"I've warned for months that a JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares… This is a Biden win for flyers!"

Warren was the planned merger's biggest opponent in Congress, per Fox Business. She was not alone. The Biden administration treated the deal as a textbook anticompetitive grab.

Look at the math. The merger Senator Warren called "a Biden win for flyers" would have combined the sixth-largest and seventh-largest U.S. airlines. The combined carrier would have been the fifth-largest. Still smaller than every one of the four largest carriers. Half the revenue of the fourth-largest, Southwest. The four biggest airlines already control roughly eighty percent of domestic revenue. The Justice Department called this anticompetitive. It was not.

Saturday, hours after the airline died, Warren posted again:

"Spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline."

The senator who called the block "a Biden win for flyers" now blames the Iran fuel spike for an airline that filed Chapter 11 in November 2024. Sixteen months before the strikes. The senator's argument has changed. The airline's bankruptcy filings have not.

Five Federal Agencies. One Failing Airline.

This was not a normal merger review.

The Biden administration ran what its own executive order called a "whole-of-government effort" on competition. President Biden signed Executive Order 14036 in July 2021. It directed more than a dozen federal agencies to act on seventy-two antitrust initiatives and created a White House Competition Council to coordinate them. Tim Wu, a law professor and special assistant to the president, helped write the order.

The cabinet executed it. Lina Khan ran the Federal Trade Commission. Jonathan Kanter ran the antitrust shop at the Justice Department. Rohit Chopra added pressure from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

And Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, opened a second front. His department filed a public statement supporting the lawsuit. Then Buttigieg went on CNN and said the quiet part out loud. "We've generally not gotten involved in these merger cases," he said. "But that's changing today."

That is the cabinet secretary in charge of American aviation admitting on camera that what his department was doing to Spirit was unusual. He said it like he was proud of it. The video resurfaced this weekend.

Every standard test in antitrust law would have weighed all of this. Spirit was failing. Spirit's CEO testified under oath that the merger was the airline's only path to surviving at scale. Killing the merger could not help any consumer if it killed the airline.

The Biden team weighed none of it. They had a thesis from a 1930s academic movement that treats every large merger as a threat. They built a case that ignored every piece of evidence ordinary judgment would have considered. They ran it through every federal agency they controlled.

This is what happens when ideology runs the merger review.

About That Reagan Judge

Some are pointing out that Ronald Reagan appointed Judge William Young to the federal bench in 1985, and Young is the judge who blocked the merger. His January 2024 opinion ran 110 pages. He bizarrely claimed that the merger "does violence to the core principle of antitrust law."

In truth, it was Biden's team that did violence to antitrust law. Biden's handpicked star, Lina Khan, sought to remake antitrust law itself. The result was a "populist" form of antitrust we hadn't seen in century, divorced from all economic facts and reality. The brutal economic results showed stifled innovation, wrecked industries, and exploding legal bills that destroyed businesses.

The judge's appointment is a deflection. The Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, the Department of Transportation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the White House Competition Council all bent themselves toward blocking this merger by every available means. They got the result they wanted. What they do not want now is the bill.

Iran Did Not Kill Spirit

Senator Warren's other claim is that "spiking fuel prices from Trump's war" killed Spirit. The timeline destroys the argument.

Spirit filed its first Chapter 11 in November 2024, sixteen months before the Iran strikes drove jet fuel higher. It filed a second Chapter 11 in August 2025, eight months before the strikes. By April 2026, Spirit was already in rescue-loan talks because the company could not survive without the merger.

The broader fuel record breaks the rest of the argument. Federal Reserve data on Gulf Coast jet fuel show prices crashed to forty-six cents per gallon in May 2020. They spiked to $4.63 in April 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, a tenfold rise in two years. Prices fell back to $2.29 by mid-2023, held in the two-dollar range through 2024 and most of 2025, then rose above $4.00 in March 2026 after the Iran strikes. By late April, the price was $3.91.

Spirit's August 2025 reorganization plan projected $2.24 per gallon for 2026. Reality came in roughly seventy-five percent above projection.

United, Delta, American, and Southwest priced through every move in that record. They are still flying. Spirit was not destroyed by jet fuel. Spirit was destroyed by the absence of scale. The merger was the scale. The Biden administration blocked the merger. Blaming the Iran fuel spike for Saturday morning is blaming the ocean for sinking the Titanic, when it already hit an iceberg and lost three of its four bulkheads.

What Was Killed Twice

The Biden team killed Spirit Airlines and its customer base. First, in court in January 2024, by blocking the only deal Spirit's own management testified was its survival path. And then in argument, by claiming the block protected ultra-low-fare consumers — the same consumers who today have far fewer zero ultra-low-fare option.

The damage did not stop at Spirit. JetBlue lost $145 million in the first quarter of 2024, the quarter the merger officially collapsed. JetBlue has reported annual net losses every year since 2019. Its stock fell roughly nineteen percent after the airline lowered its 2024 revenue forecast. JetBlue is now culling routes and laying off staff. Two companies were damaged. One is dead.

The industry math is the same. CBS News analysis of Cirium data shows that on routes Spirit exited, average round-trip fares rose twenty-three percent. About sixty dollars per ticket. Spirit accounted for two percent of all domestic American flights. Removing two percent will lift fares industry-wide.

The pilot of NK1833 asked the tower if any other Spirit flights were coming. The controller said he did not see anything.

Seventeen thousand workers cleared their lockers Saturday morning. Pilots who trained for a decade are out of a cockpit. Flight attendants in their thirties are starting over. Mechanics with mortgages no longer have paychecks.

This is what a "Democratic Party win for flyers" looks like: fired employees, stranded passengers, and less competition. And above all else: no lessons learned or responsibility taken for their role in destroying part of the economy.