I was on an airline that could not find enough pilots at a low enough rate to fly the planes. That was Spirit Airlines, an ultra-low cost carrier. I don't mind

I was on an airline that could not find enough pilots at a low enough rate to fly the planes. That was Spirit Airlines, an ultra-low cost carrier. I don't mind small, hard seats and no snacks for a quick flight, so I thought I'd save the money. Well, it turns out that Spirit has one of the highest profit margins [0] of any domestic U.S. airline, yet they decided they'd rather cancel flights than pay pilots enough to show up [1] -- they'd even rather hand out $100 vouchers to all the affected passengers than pay the pilots more. On a flight of 50 people, that's at least $5000 they lost, not to mention the staffers they had to pay (baggage handlers, gate agents, etc) that didn't actually wind up being able to complete their jobs. [0] https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2014/09/22/sevem-u-s-carriers-among-the-worlds-most-profitable-airlines https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2014/09/22/seve... [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/09/news/companies/spirit-airlines-pilots/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/09/news/companies/spirit-airlin....