Spirit Airlines has court approval to sell its final major owned aircraft portfolio—twenty-seven Airbus narrowbodies—for a combined $668 million, nearly five months after the ultra-low-cost carrier stopped flying.
On Wednesday, September 23, U.S. bankruptcy judge Sean Lane cleared two sale orders covering ten Airbus A320ceos and seventeen A321ceos. The deals close out the last large block of Spirit jets financed through enhanced equipment trust certificates, according to reporting by View From The Wing and parallel FlightGlobal coverage of the Airbus dispositions.
Save 2026-B LLC is taking twenty-three aircraft for $567.4 million. That package includes ten A320s and thirteen A321s and is controlled by holders of Spirit’s aircraft equipment notes, so part of the headline price is credit against what Spirit already owes those lenders rather than fresh cash into the bankruptcy estate.
FTAI Aircraft Leasing Bermuda (2026) Ltd., an affiliate of FTAI Aviation, is buying four A321s for $100.7 million in cash. The four airframes are registered N661NK, N665NK, N670NK and N671NK. Together the two orders total $668,129,000.
All twenty-seven jets are older-engine V2500-powered Airbus narrowbodies built between 2015 and 2018. Buyers receive the airframes, two engines per aircraft, equipment and records on an as-is basis, which is standard for distressed narrowbody sales in U.S. airline bankruptcies.
Spirit still owned planes when it filed its second bankruptcy case in August 2025—forty-eight owned and one hundred sixty-six leased—but most of that metal was mortgaged. Twenty aircraft had already been cleared for sale to CSDS Asset Management, and a separate July motion covered one additional mortgaged jet. The September 23 orders are described as the final major portfolio.
Passenger operations ended on May 2. The court later approved rejection of remaining aircraft leases effective May 8, freeing lessors to reclaim jets while the estate worked through owned collateral. That sequence left the EETC-backed twenty-seven jet block as the last large owned set still needing a sale order.
The sales do not restart Spirit as an airline. They convert the last large owned narrowbody block into lender-controlled or lessor inventory, shrinking what the bankruptcy estate still has to remarket. Secondary operators and lessors will decide whether the V2500 A320-family jets return to passenger service, freighter conversion, or parting out.
For airports and former Spirit cities, the fleet liquidation is another marker that the yellow-and-blue ULCC will not rematerialize from these airframes under the old brand. Competitors such as Frontier have already begun filing into selected former Spirit trunks, including Detroit–LaGuardia service that reactivates a Spirit-era city pair, while the twenty-seven jets themselves move into the lessor and noteholder channel.
FlightGlobal’s parallel read on the Airbus dispositions underscores that the estate is prioritizing clean title transfers over trying to keep a flying company alive around the remaining owned metal. That approach matches other recent U.S. ULCC wind-downs where aircraft value is harvested for creditors first.
With the final major portfolio cleared, attention shifts to residual estate assets and any remaining single-aircraft motions. The September court orders close the largest remaining owned-fleet chapter in Spirit’s second bankruptcy and set a clearer runway for lessors already reclaiming leased A320-family jets from the grounded network.
Sources: View From The Wing; FlightGlobal
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