It’s time to talk about Private Equity and the horrors they wrought on this industry. There was a WSJ article about two years ago about how PE came in to reshape Spirit for a merger with JetBlue or plunder for bankruptcy. It was illuminating.

It went into detail about how everything was stripped. Permanent check-in desks were swapped out for part time rentals. Any employee who could be made part-time was made part-time. Everything that remained was mortgaged or leveraged. The only thing left standing were the routes and the employees, and the insinuation was that those would be mortgaged if they could be.

When the merger that was going to make the private equity wildly wealthy, fell apart, they pulled chocks and disappeared.

This is not a novel strategy. It has been used by private equity over and over again. See Sears, Toys “R” Us, KB toys, and many others.

But more disappointing, and more to the point, is how this has been used in the past against aviation and flying. This is the exact strategy of Frank Lorenzo, Carl Icahn, and many of the other Raiders of the late 80s and early 90s who killed off, damaged, and ruined beloved brands in the industry.

The only difference is the new guys hide behind vapid corporate names (Bain Capital, Trían Partners, etc.). And the rebranded from “Corporate Raiders” to “Private Equity” investors.

This is a cutthroat industry. There will always be someone struggling. And they will always fall prey to the promises of quick “cash infusions” of the PE guys.

If we are to prevent another Spirit, it is important that some reform is forced on the world of PE. ALPA, APA, SWAPA, et al need to use those big lobbying dollars to get PE reform to the table. Otherwise any number of us could be next.

Addendum: PE already bought in to Southwest.