NEW YORK: In April, Travis Arcamone was named flight attendant of the year at Spirit Airlines’ Orlando, Florida, base. A month later, he was out of a job, after the company failed to find a way out of a second bankruptcy and collapsed in early May.
Spirit’s demise has left thousands of employees scrambling for work in an industry where getting rehired can take months. Many airlines have a set number of pilots and flight attendants they intend to hire each year and have already recruited for the peak summer travel season. More broadly, the industry is navigating short-term capacity cuts to mitigate rising jet fuel costs, while also planning for long-term growth.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, estimated it could take four to five months for several hundred of Spirit’s 3,500 flight attendants to start working at a new airline, and that would be a best-case scenario.
Arcamone, who was one month shy of his ninth anniversary at Spirit when he was laid off, is settling into a new job as a car salesman, while still looking to return to the skies.
But unlike many other industries, rehired pilots and flight attendants must contend with losing seniority and starting at the bottom of their new company’s pay scale, while forfeiting flexibility over schedules and base locations.
“My nearly decade of experience at Spirit might help me get a job somewhere else, but it means absolutely nothing when it comes to how good that job will be when I walk in the door,” a laid-off Spirit pilot told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing job prospects.
“I’ll be a peer to someone who has never flown a jet before,” said the pilot, one of about 1,800 employed by Spirit at the time of its closure.
Former Spirit workers filed a class-action lawsuit last month alleging the carrier failed to provide a proper layoff notice, seeking 60 days of pay and benefits for about 17,000 employees, an attorney representing the group said. Spirit has until mid-July to respond. A company lawyer said at a court hearing that the airline gave notice as soon as it could.
The roughly 130,000 flight attendants working in the US earn an average wage of US$77,440 (RM310,562) annually, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while just over 100,000 airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers are paid an annual average of US$288,650.
Major airlines have signaled a willingness to absorb some of Spirit’s displaced workers but hiring remains limited, especially for flight attendants.
Airlines typically map out hiring plans at the start of each fiscal year based on retirements, fleet growth and scheduling needs, limiting how fast they can ramp up recruitment. Some hiring is tied to peak travel periods, narrowing the window of opportunity, while unpaid training prolongs the wait for a proper paycheck.
United Airlines, which plans to hire 1,300 pilots in 2026, said it has received 2,800 applications from Spirit employees for various roles. Delta Air Lines said it plans to hire hundreds of pilots and flight attendants in 2026.
Many other US airlines did not share their firm hiring plans, citing competitive reasons.
American Airlines said 2,000 former Spirit employees have applied for jobs, while Southwest Airlines has launched a microsite for Spirit employees to explore opportunities. Frontier Airlines said it will continue to hire Spirit employees as openings arise and JetBlue Airways said hiring was temporarily on hold.
The flight attendants’ union said airlines had scaled back training classes or paused hiring, making it harder to quickly absorb displaced workers.
“Some of these airlines had been doing weekly classes of around 100 people per week. That has been cut back at the major airlines to 30 every other week or so,” Nelson said.
Pilots may have an easier path back into the cockpit, as airlines expand capacity in the longer term and face a wave of retirements in coming years. Those with specialized experience such as check airmen – who are authorized to evaluate, instruct, and certify other pilots – or simulator instructors are likely to be in higher demand.
But for pilots, the reset is costly unless they secure rare direct-entry captain roles.
“It’s a huge pay cut and a huge change from your previous quality of life,” said Taylor Brown, a former Spirit pilot who left the struggling carrier in October last year for a new gig flying for UPS. UPS told Reuters it has all the pilots it needs for now.
