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Since he was 7 years old, voice actor and social media influencer Hunter Peterson has told people that his biggest dream was to start and run an airline. In the wake of Spirit Airlines\u2019 recent shutdown, he believes his golden opportunity has arrived at last\u2014and the internet appears to agree.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
On May 2, Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., the company that owns Spirit Airlines, announced what it called<\/a> \u201can orderly wind-down of operations,\u201d effective immediately\u2014in other words, Spirit is going out of business. The news followed years of financial struggles for the airline, multiple bankruptcies and, most recently, an untenable rise in fuel prices due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.<\/p>\n Immediately after the news was announced, Peterson took to his Instagram<\/a> and TikTok<\/a> accounts to share a \u201cgenius idea\u201d: \u201cThere\u2019s more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the U.S.,\u201d his video starts. \u201cIf we took only 20% of them and paid basically the average fare of a Spirit Airlines flight\u2014which is $30 to $40\u2014we could buy Spirit Airlines.\u201d He proposes that regular citizens should mobilize to turn Spirit into a democratically governed brand \u201cfor the people,\u201d which could go up against industry giants.<\/p>\n In just two days since that first video was posted, Peterson has amassed tens of millions of views across his Spirit-related content on socials, created a website called letsbuyspiritair.com<\/a>, and gotten nearly 150,000 people to commit their support to his plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Right now, a democratic Spirit Airlines is still just a dream\u2014but the outpouring of interest in Peterson\u2019s plan shows just how fed up the American public is with the state of the airline industry.<\/p>\n Peterson\u2019s proposition for Spirit Airlines is fairly simple: He wants the company to be run like the Green Bay Packers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Packers, unlike any other football team in the U.S., does not have a controlling owner. Instead, it\u2019s run by more than half a million stockholders<\/a>, who make major decisions for the team through elections. This system is an outlier in the NFL, and it would be a major aberration for American airlines, all of which are primarily controlled by massive institutional investors like the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Elliott Management.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\nAn airline that runs like the Green Bay Packers<\/h2>\n