Who Will Get Spirit Airlines Coveted Flights at LaGuardia?

Spirit Airlines is dead, but its coveted place at one of the New York area’s three main airports is up for grabs.A bankruptcy judge said last week that Spirit could start soliciting bids for its allotment of 22 flights a day at LaGuardia Airport, along with its Florida corporate headquarters and other assets.The access to LaGuardia is prized, but also fraught.The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the airport, wants a say in on how Spirit’s rights to fly to and from the airport are sold.The Federal Aviation Administration also has demands.

It wants Spirit to be replaced by another budget carrier.But it’s not clear how interested smaller airlines will be because operating at LaGuardia, while lucrative, can be expensive.“It all comes down to this sort of brass-knuckle economics that favors the strong and the rich and is punishing to the carriers who are trying to serve the consumer with low fares and low costs,” said Dan Akins, an aviation expert with Flightpath Economics.The F.A.A.

closely regulates access to three congested airports — LaGuardia, Kennedy International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport — by assigning airlines “slots,” or permission to land and take off at certain times.It also reviews and approves flights at Newark Liberty International Airport and airports serving Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, though the agency does not impose a strict limit on the number of daily flights.In an April bankruptcy filing, Spirit said its 22 LaGuardia slots could be worth as much as $87 million.

Spirit’s planes, engines and aircraft parts are expected to bring in far more money — cash that will be used to repay its lenders, employees and others it owes money to.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subsc...