The People’s Plane: How a Grassroots Movement is Trying to Buy Spirit Airlines

Following the sudden collapse of Spirit Airlines, a massive, unprecedented grassroots effort is trying to buy the defunct carrier and put it directly into the hands of the American public. Spearheaded by a viral movement online, the rapidly growing campaign aims to unite millions of people to prevent private equity firms from purchasing the airline’s remaining assets and carving them up for profit.“Okay, I had a genius idea,” Hunter Peterson, a voice actor and social media influencer, says in an Instagram video. “Spirit Airlines just went bankrupt, right? I’m the guy that flew Spirit Airlines for 24 hours straight. There’s more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the United States.”“Now, if we took only 20 percent of them and paid basically the average fare of a Spirit Airlines flight, which is somewhere around $30 to $40, we could buy Spirit Airlines. This is a genius idea. We nationalize Spirit Airlines, owned by the people. Airline’s gone. We make a new airline. Let’s buy an airline,” he says.Following years of bankruptcy reorganization and a court-blocked merger with JetBlue, Spirit Airlines officially ceased operations and went dark at 3 a.m. on Saturday. Flights were instantly canceled, and airport gates were permanently closed, leaving the 44 million Americans who flew the airline last year without their budget carrier. According to the organizer of the new buyout movement, the airline did not fail because people stopped flying. Instead, he says it went defunct because Wall Street loaded the company with insurmountable debt, allowing hedge funds and private equity to extract every possible dollar until the ultra-low-cost airline simply ceased to exist.Mr. Peterson, who says in another video “I’m kind of autistic and I really like airplanes,” is a professional voice actor known for his work in video games like “Honkai: Star Rail” and “Smite 2.” Last year, Mr. Peterson went viral on YouTube after documenting his grueling experience flying on Spirit Airlines for 24 hours straight. What initially began as a lighthearted joke on social media quickly snowballed into a massive, multi-million dollar pledge drive hosted on a dedicated website, LetsBuySpirit.com. Before a surge of traffic knocked out the site’s servers, 36,605 people had pledged $22,816,377, with the average pledge being $623.The terms laid out on the campaign’s website propose a cooperative, democratic structure heavily modeled after the community-owned Green Bay Packers. “The Green Bay Packers are the only community-owned franchise in the NFL. 360,000 ordinary people own shares. No billionaire can move the team. No hedge fund can gut it for parts. Spirit 2.0 is that model — applied to aviation, for the first time in American history,” Mr. Peterson says.To join the movement, the minimum pledge is set at just $45, intentionally reflecting the average price of a one-way Spirit ticket. Under the system, every verified member receives exactly one equal vote to decide on major corporate matters — such as flight routes, strategic direction, and executive leadership — regardless of whether they pledged $45 or $45,000.While voting rights are strictly egalitarian, the proposed financial terms state that profit-sharing distributions would be allocated proportionally based on a member’s initial pledge amount. Furthermore, the plan promises robust worker ownership, providing flight crews, ground staff, and other employees with meaningful equity through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The organizer is also demanding structural transparency, promising affordable fares, fully open books, and a strict cap on executive pay to ensure a fair ratio compared to the median worker’s salary.The movement’s explosive growth temporarily overwhelmed the servers at LetsBuySpirit.com, forcing administrators to pause the pledge function while they upgrade their infrastructure. No actual money is being collected yet, as the pledges act as non-binding declarations of intent. However, the coalition’s goal remains clear: aggregate enough pledges to submit a formal cooperative acquisition bid before Wall Street locks up the assets, ultimately launching Spirit 2.0 as an airline owned entirely by the people.Mr. Peterson is as shocked as anyone that his grassroots effort is exploding. “This started as a joke, okay, I’m genuinely crashing out right now,” he says with a laugh in one video.

The People’s Plane: How a Grassroots Movement is Trying to Buy Spirit Airlines

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