Spirit Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results
Lost in the shuffle of Monday’s merger announcement, Spirit also released its Q4 and 2021 year-end earnings report, with the carrier showing a $56 million loss for the year on $3.2 billion in operating revenues. It admits it was just one or two more fees away from eking out a profit on the year but will take that knowledge and use it as a teaching moment for 2022.
Spirit says it had “an unusual number of operational disruptions and flight cancellations during the peak December 2021 holiday period,” which won the understatement of the year award. Load factor for Spirit was 79.8% in Q4 with a 97.7% completion factor. If you’re willing to ignore the flights it canceled during the period, its completion factor was 100%.
Spirit ended the year with $1.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents available. It had $1.6 billion going into the last week of 2021 but charged Frontier a $100 million “merger consideration fee” which bumped up the final number.
Sun Country Unfazed by Rivals’ ULCC Merger
As Sun Country released its Q4 and year-end financials late Monday, the carrier seemed unfazed by the potential merger of two of its ULCC rivals in Frontier and Spirit. Sun Country ended the year $77 million in the black on $623 million in operating revenue for the year, a 55% jump from 2020. Sun Country earned $173 million in gross revenue for Q4, a 5% jump from the pandemic-free Q4 in 2019.
Both Frontier and Spirit combine for about 3% worth of market share at Sun Country’s base at Minneapolis/St. Paul, while Sun Country carries more than three times that figure, with nearly 10% of MSP’s passenger count. “Minnesota hasn’t been very successful for them, and I don’t think that changes for them,” said CEO Jude Bricker on his earnings call.
Sun Country ended the year with $310 million in cash and cash equivalents, a 400% increase from the $62 million it had at the end of 2020. It credits the major jump in cash reserves to actually operating flights for much of the year. The airline plans to use its cash reserves to hire extra staff to puncture the tires of all Frontier and Spirit airplanes at MSP.
Hong Kong Tightens Already Tight Quarantine Rules
Hong Kong will require cargo pilots and cargo crew working on quick turnarounds on the island to wear monitoring bracelets in order to avoid hotel quarantine. The offer is for three-day layovers or less and is subject to the ever-changing whims of the HK government.
The new rule will be effective tomorrow, and will also apply to cabin crew on passenger planes who have been in countries that Hong Kong deems to have high levels of COVID-19 still active. Also, airlines will be required to supply the HK government with visual documentation of staff working abroad — although it failed to define what exactly that means.
This will prevent airlines from being able to mix and match locally- and overseas-based crews on the same flight, because all crew on a flight must be subject to the same quarantine requirements. The bracelet at home option is only available to HK residents — which is good news for overseas crews anyway, as one never knows what restrictive policy the HK government will come up with next.
- Air France completed a sale and leaseback of two A350-900s.
- Air New Zealand is bringing a B777-300ER back into service after grounding it nearly 600 days ago in the early stages of the pandemic.
- Avanti Air added its first Dash 8-Q400.
- EgyptAir plans to launch an LCC subsidiary, Air Sphinx, in April.
- Norse Atlantic will begin selling tickets in March to a yet-to-be-determined destination in the United States. All three guys named Bjørn who run the airline have been advised to pick a destination before putting tickets on sale.
- SAS will begin serving Toronto from both Copenhagen and Stockholm this June.
- SKY Express joined easyJet’s “Worldwide by easyJet” connection program.
- Southwest incoming CEO Bob Jordan got a raise.
- Volotea took delivery of its third and final A320-200.
I love putting warm underwear on, fresh out of the dryer.
Plus it’s always fun to look around the laundromat and try and guess who they belong to.