The Spirit Airlines Rescue Mission
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The Pat Kenny Show. With Timber Living Log Cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am. On Newstalk. Conversation that counts. One Irish company based in Shannon found itself at the centre of one of the biggest aviation collapses since Pan Am and Eastern in 1991. Six West was tasked with locating and recovering almost 180 aircraft. Matthew Gee is Chief Operating Officer for Six West Aviation and he's on the line now. Matthew, good morning. Hi, Patrick, good morning. It might be worth explaining the kind of hinterland of all of this, why Ireland is such a hub for this kind of activity.
Of course, yeah. So it historically goes back to the days of Guinness Pete Aviation, really one of the first leasing companies. And stemming from that, obviously, Guinness Pete evolved into other companies. And then Several other leasing companies, many other leasing companies now were formed. And key to the hub around that is maintenance activity, law firms, tax firms, and then companies like ourselves who are aircraft operators for the lessor, the leasing companies.
Now, you might tell us how many aircraft globally or what fraction of the global fleet is actually leased out of Ireland?
Yeah.
It's approximately 50% to 60% these days. 50% to 60% of everything in the sky is leased out of Ireland. Typically, yeah. So when you get an airline collapse, as we did with Spirit Airlines, there's no doubt Irish companies would definitely be involved. Absolutely, yes, yes. So what happens? What does your company do when something like this happens? I mean, were you awakened from your slumbers to get cracking or what happens?
So we were alerted really to Spirit's difficulties in 2025. The airline had entered U.S. Chapter 11 protection twice, and that obviously allowed them a period to try and stabilize the company. Unfortunately, after the second Chapter 11, they weren't really able to fully recover the operation. And they had parked a number of their aircraft. They actually had a fleet high at one point of 214 aircraft.
Why is Ireland a global hub for aircraft leasing and recovery?
And late last year, earlier this year, they parked about 80, 85 of those aircraft already in Arizona. So they were operating on a depleted fleet. Then, unfortunately, fuel prices with events in Iran rose. Typically, at the time, airlines were paying about $1,600 per tonne for fuel. And that eventually culminated in the collapse. So at the company, we were obviously talking to a number of the customers, the aircraft leasing companies who had alerted us to this difficulty and had had us effectively on standby. And that standby slowly incremented, unfortunately, closer to the time where the airline collapsed in early May.
Now, the idea is that you would recover these aircraft, find them wherever they were scattered across airports in the United States and fly them to a safe haven where the lessors would have control of them.
That's correct. Yes, absolutely. So we effectively as the company, we're the aircraft operator for the lessors. So we have all of the legal responsibilities and requirements to fulfill as any other aircraft operator would. It's just that we don't have a schedule. We don't have passengers and we don't have cargo. It would be a very simplistic way of looking at it.
But these aircraft which had the permission to fly under the license that Spirit had, your guys, you have to get a new license to fly a particular aircraft.
That's correct. So the Federal Aviation Administration, the regulator in the U.S., initially maintained Spirit's operating certificate for the weekend in early May that they collapsed. Very quickly after that, the aircraft were removed from that operating certificate, and what's called a designated airworthiness representative was tasked to go to each aircraft scattered across the U.S., and issue a special ferry permit for the recovery of the aircraft back into Arizona.
Now, it can be a race against time because there might be people owed money by a collapsing airline. It could be caterers, it could be suppliers of fuel or whatever, and they might want to put a lien on the aircraft to stop it being flown away out of their grasp until they got paid their bills.
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