Since he was 7 years old, voice actor and social media influencer Hunter Peterson has told people that his biggest dream was to start and run an airline. In the wake of Spirit Airlines’ recent shutdown, he believes his golden opportunity has arrived at last—and the internet appears to agree.
On May 2, Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., the company that owns Spirit Airlines, announced what it called “an orderly wind-down of operations,” effective immediately—in other words, Spirit is going out of business. The news followed years of financial struggles for the airline, multiple bankruptcies and, most recently, an untenable rise in fuel prices due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Immediately after the news was announced, Peterson took to his Instagram and TikTok accounts to share a “genius idea”: “There’s more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the U.S.,” his video starts. “If we took only 20% of them and paid basically the average fare of a Spirit Airlines flight—which is $30 to $40—we could buy Spirit Airlines.” He proposes that regular citizens should mobilize to turn Spirit into a democratically governed brand “for the people,” which could go up against industry giants.
In just two days since that first video was posted, Peterson has amassed tens of millions of views across his Spirit-related content on socials, created a website called letsbuyspiritair.com, and gotten nearly 150,000 people to commit their support to his plan.
Right now, a democratic Spirit Airlines is still just a dream—but the outpouring of interest in Peterson’s plan shows just how fed up the American public is with the state of the airline industry.
An airline that runs like the Green Bay Packers
Peterson’s proposition for Spirit Airlines is fairly simple: He wants the company to be run like the Green Bay Packers.
The Packers, unlike any other football team in the U.S., does not have a controlling owner. Instead, it’s run by more than half a million stockholders, who make major decisions for the team through elections. This system is an outlier in the NFL, and it would be a major aberration for American airlines, all of which are primarily controlled by massive institutional investors like the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Elliott Management.
“Private equity is already circling [Spirit’s] wreckage,” Peterson’s website reads. “But before they lock it up—there is a narrow window for something that has never happened in commercial aviation. The passengers, the workers, and the communities Spirit served can take it back. Like the Green Bay Packers.”
Right now, Peterson is asking followers to log on to his website, share their email address, and pledge a dollar amount that they’d be willing to contribute to own a part of Spirit. According to the website, Peterson and his team imagine a future company in which each owner is afforded one vote on any major issue involving the brand, no matter how much they contribute, with profit sharing awarded proportionally based on total investment. At this stage, no money is actually being collected—it’s essentially just a test to see whether there’s actually enough interest out there to make a democratic Spirit financially viable.
So far, letsbuyspiritair.com has already crashed multiple times due to a massive influx of users. As of the most recent available count, 142,505 have shared their email address with the site, promising a hypothetical $88,071,428 toward a future deal.
The airline ‘for the people’
Peterson’s plan is far from an actual deal, but the way that it’s exploded on the internet is a signal in itself.
Right now, Peterson’s initial video announcing his plan has more than 10 million views across platforms and thousands of comments—nearly all of which are in support of his concept.
“A nonprofit airline whose only purpose is to force lower rates from all airliners would go hard asf,” one Instagram commenter wrote. “So we have equity in the business and can travel because we can actually afford the fares?” another person on TikTok added. “I’m in.” Others compared the plan to turning Spirit into “the Costco of the sky,” a “sky bus,” and “the airline for the people.”
This outpouring of support is a clear indicator that, for American travelers, the state of the airline industry is getting dire. Despite Spirit Airlines’ reputation for adding countless added fees to tickets, the brand represented the last bastion of semi-affordable air travel in many Americans’ minds.
In the past few months alone, all four top U.S. airlines (Delta, United, Southwest, and American) have committed themselves to focusing more on “premium” offerings for wealthier clientele. Meanwhile, average prices have soared due to the cost of jet fuel. For the average flier, buying a ticket feels more and more like splurging on a luxury purchase—if it’s even attainable at all.
Peterson’s claim is that Spirit Airlines’ budget approach wasn’t the reason for its demise—it was corporate mismanagement that ultimately grounded the company’s planes, he says. Alongside his hundreds of thousands of followers, he’s arguing that the right leadership can get the business off the ground again.
“Spirit didn’t fail because people stopped flying,” Peterson’s website reads. “It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could. The routes are real. The demand is real. The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people—not to shareholders.”