Frontier CEO Barry Biffle spoke at Wall Street Journal conference in New York in May 2022. (Photo by Steven Ferdman)

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In 2022 Frontier Airlines wanted to merge with Spirit. A deal would have created a national low-fare airlines. It might have worked, but then JetBlue forced Frontier out, bidding $3.8 billion. The JetBlue merger was rejected by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Ultimately, with a merger with Frontier, these people wouldn’t have lost their jobs this weekend," Barry Biffle, formerly CEO of Frontier as well as chief marketing officer of Spirit, said Monday in an interview. “But we never got to that place.” Frontier Spirit could have been a national low-fare carrier, the fifth largest U.S. airline. Biffle never talked to regulators about the deal, but it seems likely they would have been interested in the obvious consumer benefit.

“Everyone knows I wanted to merge with Spirit,” Biffle said. “We made an offer. But JetBlue came in and made what was believed to be the higher offer. Spirit could have survived if they had accepted our agreement and merged with us.”

Instead, Biffle spent the past weekend on the phone talking, texting and emailing with Spirit employees who were losing their jobs. “I was talking to people all weekend, and I was up most of the night on Saturday,” the last day when Spirit operated, he said. He communicated with dozens of Spirit people. “I spent nine years there. I have a lot of friends there. I hired some of them, and I helped build it. I felt bad for those folks. If you’re a pilot and you’re 55, starting over at the bottom of the seniority list is very tough.

“Spirit was a great airline,” he said. “It became one of the highest margin airlines in the world and now 15,000 people have lost their jobs. It’s not their fault that economic factors in the industry – oversupply and fuel prices – came together.”

Of course, Biffle thought back to his early days at Spirit, days when he and Ben Baldanza built the airline. “I thought about Ben and the ideas he had for Spirit,” he said. The beloved, outspoken Baldanza became the widely recognized face of Spirit, serving as CEO from 2005 to 2015. In 2024, he died at 62 of ALS.

A University of Alabama grad, Biffle spent four years at American Eagle before joining US Airways in 1999. He was managing director of marketing from 2003 to 2005. At US Airways headquarters in Crystal City, he and Baldanza became close friends, often eating lunch together. They saw potential in the Caribbean, which they established a major US Airways presence, and then a Spirit presence.

At US Airways, “I ran the Caribbean opportunity team, then worked in international planning. I spent four years growing the Caribbean.” Biffle said. US Airways’ Caribbean portfolio grew from a handful of daily departures to about four dozen. US Airways turned Charlotte into a major Caribbean gateway and also opened a Fort Lauderdale gateway. “We put in everything: Aruba, Antigua, St. Maarten, St. Croix, all of those routes,” Biffle said. “We started over 40 routes in four years.” Caribbean revenue grew to about $2 billion in 2004 from around $300 million in 1999.

By the end, he said, US Airways was “making over $250 million a year in the Caribbean, even though the domestic side was losing money.” US Airways filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, emerged, filed again in 2004 and then merged with America West Airlines in 2005. In 2013, US Airways merged with American.

During the second bankruptcy, “Ben was looking at a bunch of things,” Biffle said. “He had a job offer from a casino company and tried to convince me to go into the casino business. He was higher level, a senior officer, I worked for him. But I said ‘Don’t give up on the airline industry’. And we started looking at Spirit.”

In February 2005 Biffle and Baldanza left US Airways and headed for South Florida to work for Spirit. It had about 30 aircraft and about $500 million in revenue. Baldanza was president, then CEO and president. Biffle was chief marketing officer. The carrier was losing money, but it became profitable, partly due to Caribbean flying. Biffle left in 2013. When he arrived, he said, Spirit was losing $50 million a year: it made $177 million on revenue of $1.7 billion in 2013.

Biffle was briefly CEO of Viva Colombia Aerolinea, but it was bought out. He joined Frontier as president in 2014, becoming president and CEO in 2016. “Initially we wanted to outdo Spirit, but we would do it more customer friendly, and be a better brand,” he said. “Our motto was ‘Low Fares Done Right.”

Biffle still likes the airline industry. “It’s one of the best businesses in the world,” he said. “It attracts the best and the brightest. It enables people to travel. You feel good about helping people.” Especially at Spirit and Frontier, “the ones who carried the people with $50,000 income who could afford to travel with us and get to visit grandma before she died. That wasn’t all of our customers, but a large portion of our customers couldn’t afford to fly without the likes of Frontier and Spirit.”