EP 11 - Inside the Massive Spirit Airlines Repo Operation

Like the less or said, we want crews at each one of these airports of where we think our airplanes are going to end up tonight. So those airplanes hadn't even landed yet. Spirit had not officially closed, but they wanted to be proactive and spend the money to make sure that there was crews like ready to go Friday night on top of talking to spirit pilots who are like some in the middle of trips with passengers. That have not been told that their airlines closing. A call from some guy like me, I mean, that they don't know is telling them that, you know, you're probably going to be out of work tomorrow. But I'm ready to put you to work. I mean, that that call, if I was on the other side of it, I would be thinking this guy is some whack job. I mean, what? And I had guys that were going, um, okay, you know, I'm flying people in right now. I'm supposed to fly tomorrow. Um, I guess if that doesn't happen, can I call you back? I'm like, let me put it this way. You're on the payroll right now. Definitely call me back when when you get the news. We had to figure out where everybody was and if they weren't there, we had to get them there. Some of the pilots, so one guy was on an overnight spirit in Newark. In Newark, another guy was in the Nashville. Yeah. And one guy, one guy had only shorts and uniforms. That was a guy in Nashville. He was worried about it. Like, oh, I like. I don't care, man, flying shorts. It's all good, brother. Well, somebody said business casual. I'm just like, I just threw that out there. Man, I don't care. Just show up, please. Yeah. I'm Steve Giordano. I'm Bob Allen. And this is cockpit casual, the podcast episode 12. Oh, man, 12. I don't even know what it feels like after this week. This has been the craziest week ever. Well, I know everyone's been, you know, waiting. I mean, we actually skipped the pod last week. I've kind of lost track of time. Everybody's been kind of anticipating this. And here we are. We're going to talk about how the Phillies have gone 10 and three with new management over the last two weeks. You've had time to like actually look at the sports or anything. I know I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world. I haven't, I mean, I haven't even looked at social media until today. I've tried to post a few things and look at a few things along the way, but I mean, I've had very little time. I mean, I've just been wanting to sleep, honestly. I'm exhausted. Yeah. No, I am too. This has been probably, I mean, I know I've said this before, but I truly believe that this has been the busiest week, the busiest, I guess eight days, I would call it eight days that we have ever had ever in the history of ferrying airplanes at any of the companies we've owned. Definitely. I agree. I mean, there was times during COVID that it got pretty crazy just because there was a, like, a significant amount of airplanes to move all at the same time, but nothing like this. Nothing. No, I mean, those things got logistically complicated because of COVID times and, and they were international. But this takes the cake. I mean, even, even for logistics and it was, it was, it was tough, man. It was tough. And, and here's what we're going to do today. I mean, today's pod is going to be 100% talking about this spirit, aircraft storage project, the repo project or whatever you want to call it because there's a lot to say. I mean, it's very interesting. We've been on the mainstream media all week, Wall Street Journal, front page tomorrow. Today, I guess if I've released this one on Tuesday, you know, with CBS evening news, I have a local ones. And yeah, I did NPR. You're doing local ones. Yeah. I've done Miami Phoenix. I've got more Phoenix tomorrow, actually, a couple of stations. We've told the story a lot, but no one's, and then I'm going to do a couple. I'm going to do the I have talk pod, I know, Ian reached out and I said, I always got time for you guys. So I do love those guys. So there'll be, there'll be a lot of discussions about this. It's honestly, it's a very interesting case study as to how to scale a business up to doing something that you're not even built to necessarily do at the scale that we did it. Yeah. And it's just really interesting. We learned a lot of lessons along the way. And it's, I can't even begin to like explain how dynamic the situation has been from minute one. And I'll start by saying it finished today, like at least for now. There's still a handful of airplanes, still a bunch of airplanes out there. I've got an ID badge still on it. Just walked in from from Miranda Arizona. It literally started Friday. What is today, son? I lost track. I thought it was Sunday. So it's Monday. So it's been Friday to Friday to Monday. So it's been a week. I mean, it's been like, yeah, something like 10, 11 days. I need more. Yeah. The last one went today Atlantic City to Marana. And like I said, I mean, that's two dozen we've done. And there are still some more out there. And I fully expect to get some more phone calls. But right now the big push is complete. It was our big pushes. It really was. And the leasing companies that are always like, you know, first on site to get their airplanes or to do anything. Yeah. There are clients and, you know, I mean, that's what we have the reputation of doing also of making things happen in a very short amount of time and taking very complicated flight operations and getting them organized and completed. And under budget. The one that I got invoice today, 10 aircraft under budget by like 15 grand. Yeah. So which is amazing considering what we were up against all week. Yeah. We did it. We did it fast. We did it efficient. I think we probably made about $1.50 an hour when you go back and figure out how much we worked. Anyway, we're going to go through the whole thing. Before we start that, I want to just give a little bit of an explanation about how things are going to work this week as far as the pod and the YouTube and all that stuff. So I have been out with the cameras somewhat amid all this busyness. I had the opportunity to fly one of the airplanes earlier this week. And then I actually saw off the last airplane today and Bob has been receiving every airplane down in Rana. So we filmed a lot, not everything, but we filmed it a good bit. I got some really interesting interviews with some with a couple of spirit pilots with a spirit flight attendant who is number one 36 years. The company started flying converse in flight footage and rather than publish the podcast as a couple of talking heads on YouTube this week like we normally do, it's going to be a little different. So the podcast and its entirety, this is it. It's only going to be available in audio on Apple, Spotify, all the places that you guys all listen to us. And then the video, which I'm hoping to drop by Friday because I'm going on vacation this weekend. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I want to put out kind of a little mini cockpit casual documentary that covers the entire project, which will cut to the talking heads of this podcast, but also have a bunch of flight footage, intermixed and we're just going to get to kind of go over the whole project in a video as a cockpit casual and ambitious, but my plan is to try to get it out this week. So it's not going to be as polished as cockpit casual, but it's going to be, I think you guys are going to like it. Audio podcast, however long we run, however long it goes, it goes video end of the week, kind of a hybrid podcast cockpit casual. I think it's going to be really good. I'm really, really excited to make it. Like I said, though, it's going to be a bit daunting. Yeah, yeah. You got your work cut out for you. I mean, there's, there's literally enough for like a whole documentary on, on the shutdown and repossession process. I mean, the logistics of it all and then just the human stories that have happened over the week. It's just, man, there's, there's a lot and I know we, let's just, I guess let's get in and talk about it. I thought about sending a text over to Harvey Levin of TMZ. Like, I, you know, I have his number and like, you know, we work together on a project and like, we've texted back and forth a few times. I was tempted to just be like, hey, I got all this footage. You guys want to do, you guys want to do something? Hey, he knows, you know, I mean, it's a perfect opportunity. It's a great story. Maybe I'll shout. You should. I mean, who knows where that goes? Yeah. Yeah. Then you won't have to do all the editing. Do you like it? Yeah. That's kind of the goal. I'll tell you what, we're going on vacation for her birthday for our 17th anniversary. We're going down to the Caribbean and this weekend, man, I'm going to unplug and I'm going to sit in the sun. I'm going to get some color on my skin. I'm going to get some sand on my toes and some beer in my belly. I'm going to. Thank God this didn't happen a week later than it did, huh? Well, I mean, it didn't exactly happen at the most opportune time. Let's get right into it. Exactly. So all right, let's back up first to like January, February timeframe because I think we've talked about this on the pod before. We got a call from one of our very large lesser clients, one of the largest lessors in the world saying, hey, the writings on the wall, spirit, we have 10 jets there, 321 Nios. Then you quote, getting them back, but kind of quote it very basically because we don't know where these airplanes are going to be. And we said, okay, you know, sounds good. Put them all in MSN's tail numbers, put them into our system, put together a couple quotes like an East Coast quote, a West Coast quote, a South America quote, just, you know, just getting our ducks in a line so they aren't surprised when the time comes. And then they told us, I guess there were two instances where this almost happened before last week, right? Yeah, where they said, be on standby. We may be calling quick. Yeah. And so both of the times that that happened, like the night before each time the can got kicked down the road, our contact reached out and said, this is where all the airplanes are going to be tomorrow. So get ready. And that happened twice. And you know, it was like one was in Atlantic City and one was in Chicago and one was in San Fran or wherever. I don't remember. So we kept getting like the list and then each time everything got bailed out. So fast forward a couple months to this past Friday, not this past Friday, the Friday before it was the date. Was that my second? That was the night before the Kentucky Derby that I was hoping to. And dolds myself in. So it was Friday before the Kentucky Derby, which is the first Saturday of every May. Right. May 1st. It was May 1st. We got a call about 10 a.m. I was in the car on my way to Pittsburgh. I was driving to Pittsburgh because my son graduated from University of Pittsburgh this past this past. Well, last weekend. So we spent four days there, dinners, all that, all that jazz. So the call came in to me and I didn't recognize the number. Actually, I sent it to voicemail. And then I guess he called Bob and then Bob called me and then I called him and then it was like, Hey, this might happen again. And of course, I was somewhat cautious about it. I'm like, yeah, you know, we've done this twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But Bob and I talked on the phone while while I was driving and said, all right, well, like we got, we got some cities now. So let's, let's start seeing what we have for logistics and all along. I mean, we have six full time pilots. Everybody else is a contractor, right? I would say our inner circle is about six, like people that work for nomadic and that's all they do. And then we go to about probably a dozen with like close contractors, people that we, that don't collect any type of base salary, but they are our go to pilots. And then and they're scattered around the planet. They're not all in America. And then we have, you know, the ability to kind of scale to about maybe 25 to 35 pilots using people that we know very well. Depending on type. Yeah, depending on type. Exactly. I mean, 320 pretty much everybody's typed on that. 7373 320. We always are fat with right. But it doesn't, you know, half of them are in Ireland and some guys in China. We got a guy in Australia like we got people all the American, South America everywhere. So it wasn't going to be one of those deals where we could just, well, certainly wouldn't have been cost effective for our clients. Yeah. Yeah. And at the time, we were under very, very tight timeline. Yeah. And so we did what we expected we were going to do and that was kind of go out to our, our spirit pilot group contacts. One of my very close friends, a guy that was my flight instructor. He was a 15 year spirit captain, training department, Sim instructor, just a solid, solid dude. Bob knows some guys. We all know a couple of spirit guys. Yeah. I don't know people from every airline. Yeah. Yeah. One in particular that helped us out a lot was the guy that used to fly 727s with, he used to move around 727s for me, you know, back in the fairy days of those airplanes. And so he's always stayed in touch. Yeah. Yeah. There's just a great network that we have and it's developed, you know, we've had this network going for multiple decades. It's a win-win situation for everybody. These pilots are out of work. They're going to need money. I mean, you know, it's not going to get them very far, but it's still money, you know, that might cover the mortgage payment this month. Yeah. Or health insurance, which is a big thing with these guys. They're a gas or everything. Everything helps. Everything helps. And rather than just run a couple of people ragged, you know, we wanted to get enough pilots that we could just get as many as many in the mix as we could. So it saved us time and money and it was an opportunity for them. And then here's something that is so important that people don't think about. So as a fairy pilot, you know, one day I'm flying with Bob, one day I'm flying with Pat, one day I'm flying with, you know, Mike Holliday, who's, say, Air Canada, and like, you know, and I'm flying with an Alaska guy and I'm flying with an American guy. Everyone's got different SOPs, different callouts, different ways of doing things. And that's by design. Airlines do that so you can take, you know, you had an airline like United, it was, I don't know, thousands of, I don't know, I mean, I probably have a lot. Yeah. I mean, you might never fly with the same person twice throughout your whole career at United. And so the goal is to take two pilots from any background, anywhere in the system, put them in the cockpit together and then they do the job like they've been together for years. That's called SOP, it's standards. And every airline has their own SOP and their own standards and they do things a certain way. And in the very world, we just get used to kind of adapting to who we're flying with. You know, if I'm flying with an Alaska guy, I adapt to their callouts. Yeah, that's the, you know, that's our culture at Nomadic is this, you know, adaptability and going with, you know, whatever works for both guys, it just kind of, it's so exciting. I mean, yeah, exactly. So when you take a bunch of airline pilots, let's say, you know, we mixed it with a group of American Delta United, you know, British Airways, Cathay pilots to do all this. You got people speaking different languages in the cockpit. Like they're all speaking English, but they're all doing things a little bit differently. If you have to scale quickly and you have to move a bunch of jets quickly, if you're using all pilots from the same pilot group, they are already speaking the language. They already are all of the same processes and procedures, the same callouts. So right off the bat, it's also a massive increase in safety and standardization using a common pilot group for a gigantic scaled project like this. Yeah, not to mention that, you know, they're taking, they're being taken out of their normal environment and put into this very chaotic place that they're not used to at all. And so having two people, you know, kind of watch out for each other that understand, you know, that same airline culture, it makes it a much safer operation on these short, short turn deals like that. So immediately we started putting out the feelers and I don't know what was probably mid afternoon on Friday of last week, you started contacting people, I started contacting people and we started a WhatsApp group. So our company communications all happen on Slack, you know, we have channels for different work groups and trips and so on and so forth, but you know, you can't scale that. So WhatsApp was the key and immediately we got our admin team to start creating trip channels for each trip on the horizon and like a master group chat with, I think it was called spirit pilots. Yeah, just generic. And everybody that we brought in, we basically, you know, we started with people that we know very well, that no ferrying airplanes and know who would be potentially really good at it. Somebody that's not going to be complaining about sitting around or that there's no food under, you know, or that there's no performance data like, you know, or, you know, all of these things, yeah, it's not coming over eight cars. What, you know, how to, right? Is that legal? There, yeah, there was not, yeah, we had to find people that understood basically nonskid aviation. Yeah. So we got to go. We grabbed a bunch of those and then we gave them admin privileges for each channel and each one of these pilots started adding other pilots. And in the blink of an eye, we almost had to be like, okay, I think we're good. We had like 40. Yeah. I mean, within six hours, I think we had, you know, we definitely had the initial 20 airplanes filled because as we got guy, we just started assigning them to tail numbers. All right. These two guys signed there, figure out the logistics of how to get them there. If they're not there already. Yep. And one of the things that you'll hear us consistently talk about in the ferry business that's kind of a, like a challenge is when you come upon the weekend, like you only get five days of really getting stuff done Monday through Friday, airlines, less ors, airports, authorities, government agencies, everything shuts down on the weekend. So we finally got the go at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 1st. And so that's the end of the week. Yeah. Yeah. And we know we're going to continue it. Yeah. And so, and I do just to clarify that Friday call was to have people on standby, like, like the less or said, we want crews at each one of these airports of where we think our airplanes are going to end up tonight. Spirit had not officially closed, but they wanted to be proactive and spend the money to make sure that there was crews like ready to go Friday night. And, and we had, we had to do that. So on top of talking to spirit pilots who are like some in the middle of trips with passengers that have not been told that their airlines closing. Call for some guy like me, I mean, that they don't know is telling them that, you know, you're probably going to be out of work tomorrow. I mean, what, and I had guys that were going, um, okay, um, you know, I'm flying people in right now. And I'm supposed to fly tomorrow. I guess if that doesn't happen, can I call you back? Really call me back when, when you get the news and, uh, and, and, and ensure enough. So the first cities that we had in the first cadre of 10 airplanes was Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Charlotte, Columbus, Ohio, and Orlando. And there were multiple aircraft in some places. There's one in Miami. I think there were three in Lauderdale, two in Houston, one in Charlotte, one in Columbus, two in Orlando or something. Yeah, two in Orlando. So we had to figure out where everybody was. And if they weren't there, we had to get them there. Yeah. It was worried about it. Like, oh, like, I don't care. Man flying shorts. I'm just like, that just threw that out there. Man, I don't care. Yeah. Exactly. So we started getting guys moved. And so Bob, why don't you talk about why the push to try to move ASAP? Like why were we trying to fly them out that weekend? There's a main, there's a very important reason. Well, so, you know, the, the less or has had these assets. I mean, as soon as these assets are no longer under, you know, spirit control. I mean, they, they, they have, you know, I don't know these four, that less or probably those 400, 500 million dollars in assets sitting, sitting there alone, not being maintained. And it's very important to get back in control of your assets and get them to a place where they can now be maintained again. So, you know, when they're out in no man's land like this, you know, you never know if you have angry employees, you never know kind of what, what may happen to your airplanes, just like sitting out there by itself, basically unsupervised, unmaintained. And also that, that we're flying those airplanes within a certain amount of time before inspections or do again. Right. And well, and the other thing that I was getting at is our initial plan, our initial plan, which is the way that this always happens. I mean, we've repossessed airplanes. Oh, if I want to get into that, I think I do want to get into it. Do we not want to get into it? No, go. Yes. It was just a nightmare for me. You still having, you still having that night? I'm glad I was at the G. Yes, G man. Oh my God. So in order to move a heavy airplane, it's only in an assessed ongoing, right? Like a heavy airplane has to have some sort of continuing airworthiness support on it, right? There has to be a maintenance program is the colloquial term for how these aircraft are legal to fly that you can't just have an Airbus A320 and sort of very specific documented inspection schedule, maintenance event schedule. Every little element from checking tire pressures to checking oil and fluid levels, everything is on like this, this, this different inspection program. And every airline has their own that's signed off by their POI. POI is a primary operations inspector, me FAA. FAA assigns a POI to each air carrier. Their entire job is the oversight of that air carrier. And they sign off an inspection program that meets the recommendations and guidance of the manufacturer and also is tailored to their operation. And when an aircraft is on their air operating certificate, their AOC, on their ops spec, the airplanes are being maintained in accordance with their maintenance program. And until the ops spec is recalled or disbanded by the regulator, that maintenance program is guaranteeing the airworthiness of those assets. So what is the normal policy and procedure for repossessing aircraft that are just coming out of an airline that still has a legal AOC. We move the airplanes on that airworthiness program under part 91 with third party pilots. Normal, we've done it a million times, we've been doing it for years. That is the standard procedure. We even do it with operating airlines for maintenance flights and all of that. We do it with a lot of time every we had four this week that went at the same time we were dealing with this. So you know, those were just going to maintenance, not being repossessed or anything. So the the goal was nobody knew when spirits AOC was going to get revoked. The idea it was that we move the airplanes as quickly as we can before the inspections are due while they're still on the inspection program, even though the aircraft were no longer in the custody of spirit. They were court ordered from the US bankruptcy court. Leases terminated back into possession of the less sores, but they were still being maintained as airworthiness. They were flying passengers 12 hours prior. So 9 a.m. Saturday, 20 pilots, 10 crews on site throughout the country, all at the airport all ready to go. And we were we were very lucky to have several very proactive pilots that had connections at different airports and they went out there and they you know, they scope the place out and found out a lot of information and connected us with some some very key people. Every time an airplane came in, first question is where is it parked at an airport? You have the terminal area is part of the side of the security identification display area. Basically, you have to be background check fingerprinted, bagged and that expires every year or two. Even pilots at the airlines don't necessarily have access to the side at their home airport. They usually do, but certainly not at outstation airports. So if an airplane is at the terminal or on a hard stand or in the side, we can't get to it. We can't get our crew to it. We can't get maintenance to it. We can't get stairs to it. We can't get a D.A.R. to it. We can't get anything. So we have to figure out where the airplane is. If we can get to it, what handlers have access to that particular area and if if none of those things drive, then we have to figure out how to get it and how to relocate it to somewhere on the field where we can access it. Meanwhile with handlers who have not been paid by spirit and want to have nothing to do with those airplanes. Yet another challenge that repeatedly reared its head throughout the last week. Oh, yeah, well, we'd love to help you, but spirit owes us $850,000. So we're not going to be doing it. Hey, hey, hey, this isn't spirit. We're not spirit. I'll prepay you. Sometimes that didn't even work. Yeah, exactly. They were under orders from their corporate office to not. service anymore spirit aircraft. And we said, "Well, the only thing spirit about this airplane is its paint job right now." So, exactly. Luckily, there's a lot of people that, you know, from ground ops and airport security, airport authorities that all follow our social media and know who we were. So when we called, they were familiar like with us. And it kind of, you know, it brought some credibility to the table. And we were able to get some things done, you know, just kind of with our, with our reputations, you know, even for what they just see on cockpit casual, honestly. Yeah. So first, three to four hours on Saturday, I was still in my hotel room. We didn't have any festivities yet for the graduation. I'm like on my phone. I'm like, I feel bad because of Bob and Emily and every-- We were up all night. I mean, I was-- All night. Yeah, I didn't sleep all night. I literally did not sleep, you know, one minute Friday night, Saturday morning. And I did. Yeah. [LAUGHS] But when I woke up in the morning, I had like serious guilt and fomo. And I said, I made all of them-- The zillion messages to go through. Yeah. So I just kind of jumped in. I started catching up on what we-- I called Bob. He gave me a half a wake debrief. I think I had to call you like three times because you were a sleep sitting in that chair. Yeah, I kept like, you know, slumping over. And then my phone would ring. And I would yell, yeah, yeah, what's going on? Yes, yes, yes. Everything's ready to go. I go shit. So are you? Yeah. What is this about? Exactly. So I jumped in. I had a couple hours. I started making phone calls, started tackling logistics at some airports and started meeting opening lines of communication with the pilots that we had that, you know, and putting out fires two to three at a time, call to call. Every call I was on, I would get the call waiting in another call. Maybe it was a number that I didn't recognize. At one point, I had to like memorize what area codes all these airplanes were in so that I knew whether I could answer or ignore a call. You know, how important it was going to be. So let's back up into Saturday morning. That was Friday night. That was one less or with 10 aircraft that wanted crews ready to go. Well, Saturday morning, one of our other good clients who had 10 airplanes called and said, hey, Bob, what's going on? I'm going to need you to move some airplanes. And I'm like, oh, are they spirit? How did you know? I'm like, oh, boy, I'm like, hey, listen, we've already written the playbook for this. So give me the tail numbers. Let me know where they're at. And I'm going to add you to the list. I'm going to add flight crews to it. And so it doubled, doubled what we already had on the plate. Saturday. And by the way, let me reiterate, we were on about page six of a hundred page playbook at this point. So it wasn't completely written, but. [LAUGHTER] I mean, we had already-- actually, the major-- Lauderdale, Houston, places were Dallas, places where there were a lot of spirit airplanes. They all also happened to be the most challenging logistically. And so we had ice things at those places already. And we had the pilot part figured out. By Saturday morning, the word was out. And we had a flow of flight crews available. And we're trying to be efficient. I got another letter to request, another fire to put out, another handler to call, another fuel contract to research. I mean, it was just madness at this point. Plus, plus-- I mean, we've got all those logistics going on. Plus, we have the less sores. The aircraft owners are calling us. I mean, I was getting a call every 30 minutes wanting an update. And wanting to know why airplanes weren't already in the air. So I mean, the people that we deal with on the technical side are under tremendous amounts of pressure from the financial side of these companies. And they're counting on us to make things happen. To magically make them look good so that they can go back and tell their superiors that, yeah, it's all under control. These assets are going to be moving. So I mean, it's a tremendous amount of pressure just from that side of it on top of everything else going on, logistics-wise. Yeah. And so right around noon, the first airplane in Houston was pushed out, crew on board, flight plan file, fuel being loaded. And one of the pilots gets a call from-- one of the spirit pilots gets a call from one of his spirit management pilot friends saying, you can't take this airplane. It's illegal. Stop what you're doing and call. We're calling the FAA. So they call me and I'm like, everything's good, I promise. And then-- but of course, we immediately started calling the client. We started making calls to the FISDO. And long story short, Bob ended up on multiple conference calls with the FAA, the spirit 119 team, the Lesore legal team. Everyone saying, this is how it's done. I used chat GPT plus my knowledge to compose on my phone like a three-page document. Almost like a white paper on it. It was like a white paper on it, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, it was very thorough, explained it to a T about how this is done. We've done it before. We've done it last week. It cited every reference, every FAA are, every variable. And without a doubt, it was 100% legal. It was a great plan. But we still were counting on spirit to allow us to operate the aircraft with it on their maintenance program. And ultimately, their management pilot team decided-- someone in that group decided that they did not want that liability. And they told the FAA on this conference call. And the FAA said, well, we don't think that it's not-- we've never heard of this. And-- which was-- Yeah, we're not saying it's legal or illegal. That's not-- It's not our place to say it. Yeah, it's not our place to say you're the 119 team. You guys are the ones who have to make that decision. So anyway, at the end of it all, the spirit 119 team said that they won't accept that risk. They won't allow us to-- Not only us with third party pilots, but not even their own. I offered, I'm like, yeah, how about if we use all spirit pilots? Nobody else outside of spirit flies airplanes, just like they were doing less than 12 hours ago. Let's do that. And they wouldn't go for it. There was liabilities for-- I'm not not insurance-wise, but certificate-wise. Liability is super- I'm not sure if they're really-- I'm not convinced there was a liability there. I think it was a lack of-- I think it was a lot-- it was mass confusion. I think nobody wanted to put themselves out. Yeah. And-- Like, why would they? Honestly, I mean, from their point of view, from the FAA or the 119 point of view, I mean, what was the benefit to them to go, yeah, we'll go along with this? Right. I mean, it really wasn't. It was literally to help the lessor out. So we pivoted. Yeah. So we pivoted quickly. This was on Saturday evening. We made the collective decision along with the lessor that we were working for, and the other lessors that were in the pipeline, that the simplest path was going to be to abandon the direction of trying to fly these aircraft with a standard C of A, and that we would now completely remove all responsibility and every element of control away from spirit and their 119 team. 119 team is like four pilots, by the way. And just keep people to have a 121 certificate. Director of Operations, Chief Pilot, Assistant Chief Pilot, Director of Safety Officer. Yeah, stuff that. Some of you. So that means that we had to hire, well, our clients had to hire a third party designated Airworthiness Representative at DAR to come out and issue an SFP. And if you remember from previous conversations we've had on here, an SFP is a special Airworthiness certificate that allows essentially the one time repositioning use of that aircraft under certain limitations depending on what the Airworthiness status of the aircraft is, point A to point B to get an airplane ferried. So no longer maintenance program required because the SFP is the maintenance program and it's valid for 10 days and we don't need anybody else. SFP, nomadic, airplane, it moves. Period. Period. It's just a matter of getting the DAR on site. And I would say there's probably 50, 60 DARs the United States but big but. - There are like five or maybe eight that are very experienced with large commercial aircraft. - Yeah. - Airliners. - In these situations with ferrying them. - And we know them. I mean, we know them, we like them. - We've known them for decades. We're all friends. - We knew that their schedules were gonna be just packed to the gills, so we're like, hey, we're working on, with this company, with this company, with this company, clear your schedule for the next week. We gotta start moving people around. Let's maintain comms. Let's start a dialogue, because the leasing companies don't talk to each other. - Not at all. - No, and we had resources at different airports. So it's like not just crew resources, but handling resources, technical, onsite, technical, because a DAR can go in there and issue, but they need an onsite technical team, just in case there's something that needs to be signed off, and almost every one of these airplanes would have something signed off. So, customers said, all right, this was Saturday night. We're gonna pivot to Monday, and we're gonna move airplanes. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the DAR is moving between all the cities is gonna issue SFPs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the other client was like all throughout the week, and we started, and they said, leave everybody onsite, and I said, yeah, of course, we're leaving everybody onsite. - Yeah, keep them ready to go. - And one thing about that was it's a good thing, because we literally had pilots that had been up all night long. They'd been up Friday, they stayed up all night Friday. Some caught flights to different airports at 6.37 o'clock in the morning to be onsite at another airport. They then were like waiting all this time, while we were doing these conference calls with the FAA and all these people till the late afternoon, they're all standing by literally at the airport, ready to get on airplanes, and they haven't been to a hotel, they haven't slept in quite a while by then, and they're getting exhausted. And so, is what's going through our mind is, if things are worked out, it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, we've got crews that have been up a long time, and they're gonna be flying at night into an airport, like Mariana, that's in the middle of the desert, dark. Everybody's gonna be tired, they've never been to this place. So we start assessing all of these things internally, we start trying to determine how we're gonna talk to the leasing company who is under tremendous amount of pressure to move these airplanes immediately. It's this fine line, you know, how we wanna make things work, but at the same time, we've gotta look out for the crews, we've gotta keep the operation safe, and luckily, it turned out to where we were able to tell them go to the hotel, crash out for Sunday, be prepared to go Monday, and not only the just physical being tired, but the emotional part of dealing with the loss of your airline, the job, I mean, spouses, bills, they hadn't even had 24 hours to process it in their heads, they're out with a suitcase, and they left home maybe a day or two before on a trip expecting to have a full month slate of trips to fly. And now all of a sudden, you know, they're working for these two guys on a WhatsApp channel. - Who many acts. - They've never heard of. - Yeah, who are telling them to just like stand around the airport for just a couple more hours, we'll have news for you, it just goes on and on. - It's real for them. - It is. But they played ball with it's not one person complained that entire day. They just said, you know, just keep us advised what we gotta do and, you know, we're gonna make it work. We are tired, we'd like to go to a hotel, but we understand what you're dealing with. So just let us know what to do. I mean, I've never seen a pilot group, you know, so ready to make things happen. Considering, especially considering what they just were dealing with. - We were able to deliver the news that they could take the day off on Sunday and just sleep, relax, you know, do some laundry, go buy some, you know, go buy some slas. - It was like the first time that they had a chance to breathe. And so Sunday was the day that we were trying to start putting things in place, which is very hard to do over the weekend. Like I would say, one out of every five calls we made got returned. - Yeah. And we had 20 airplanes at that point. - By Sunday. - By Sunday. - No, we had 23, I think. - Maybe 22. - 22 by Sunday, I think. Yeah. That we're on the plate that we need to figure out all these logistics for. - Yeah. And we started kind of processing the order that was gonna go, we had discussed with the DARs what cities they would be in. So we knew, all right, we could book hotels till Tuesday for the Charlotte guys. And we could book hotels through Wednesday for the Houston guys. And like, 'cause we knew they were gonna be on site and maybe something would change. But, you know, if there's no way that someone in Houston was gonna go out on Monday, because the DAR was going to Florida airports on Monday. - Yeah. - So, yeah, I want some of these less or legal teams in Ireland. Like all of them. So, there's this time zone gap too. - But they were working at 2 a.m. Like, the lawyers were working through the night. - This is a thing. Everybody was working 24 hours a day on this. - Yeah. - From the less hours to us, everybody involved. The technical teams, it was wild. - Yeah. So, that's how we spent Sunday. Monday, I spent five hours driving home from Pittsburgh. Actually, my wife drove four out of five hours while I could be on my phone, which was super helpful. At that point, me and Bob were both working full speed on the phone every five minutes, on different calls, together on conference calls, on emails, on, you know, a laptop out, like, Wi-Fi hotspot in the car, all that stuff, arranging, arranging, arranging. And I think we got the first airplane out by about 1 p.m. on Monday. - Yeah. Yeah. And just, it was constant putting out fires and pivoting to different scenarios. And just to say, you know, one thing about our team, I mean, our team was working 24 hours. And it wasn't just Steve and I that were, you know, making all these crew decisions and dealing with airplanes. We have project managers, we assigned to different tail numbers who were also, you know, involved in this, you know. - Pass. - Yeah. - Your daughter Emily is like our admin. I mean, and she was doing stuff that normally we would do. - She was doing crew scheduling, all the travel. I mean, she was assigning crews to airplanes, you know. I'm like, - Getting crews under contract, collecting documents. - Yeah. (laughing) - Looking at their travel, like, oh my God. - Yeah. Yeah, and then our dispatchers dealing with all the fuel, all the flight plans. - Yeah. - Yeah, dealing with airports and the legal logistics. - And setting up processes for expenses as they came in, because the expo, because on a project like this, I mean, I want to say in the last 10 days, we've had 90 vendors, 100 vendors. - Yeah, easily. - So invoices coming in from everything from like travel to handling, to fueling, to technical service. - Parties, to technical services, to escorting people, you know, across the ramps. Sometimes we had to have like two or three different handlers at an airport, 'cause only one person had the right tow bar, only one person had had a fuel contract that could get to that part of the airport, only one person had side access. So like, we were having to like mix match. So then over the course of the week, like we just, we started developing a rhythm. - Yeah. - This is the best way that I could play. - Well, the playbooks started to develop, you know, of what we needed to do when. And what specific things that were common amongst airports that started developing a pattern. - Yeah. Yeah, and spirits, 119 team moved a couple of airplanes out from under our nose as well. Like they moved some of the airplanes themselves without an SFP, not many. I think they moved to maybe three. But I mean, we were still moving. I mean, the OMDs were going crazy. And socials were blowing up. I'm like, man, I remember I called Bob at one point. I'm like, we're missing an opportunity here, Bob. I know we're busy, but like we gotta post something on LinkedIn and on. - I like, man. I don't have to. That's on the bottom of my list at the moment. I gotta get, I gotta call this crew. Let me call you in five minutes. minutes. I ended up flying one trip. I flew out of Philly for the first time in my career, which was kind of cool. Bob and I are way better off as quarterbacks, like making decisions, kind of assigning tasks. I love one view. We're way better than flying. Yeah. For sure. Gotta have us having that high level view of the entire playing field. You were also an Uber driver. So we had two airports. All but one aircraft went to either Good Year or Miranda. Yeah. I mean, so as soon as these things started stacking up, I saw the logistics problem of getting crews from these airports to Phoenix or Tucson or wherever. How do we get them to a hotel? How do we get them to an airport to fly home? So there's car services available, but there's a lot of coordination that comes with that. We have the time that the airplanes are going to fly into these airports is very fluid. It's not like a set schedule. It's like whenever they can get it going, jump in, take off, and we'll have everything figured out by the time you get here. Yeah. Nothing was known until they were wheels on. Yeah. Because every single trip was potentially going to delay an hour, 15 minutes, two hours, six hours. Yeah. Yeah. Which is common for us. We're used to that kind of stuff. But there's always something. But I was like, okay, there's going to be potentially six to eight crews landing within like an hour of each other in some of these cases. So initially, like the first day, I think Monday, it was there. I was going to be like, I was going to end up with four people at a time. So had my son run out to enterprise and I just said, just rent the biggest SUV that you can. They didn't have any buses at the time like our big vans. And yeah, I was right. I was just like, get the biggest thing that they rent. So had a big SUV and I started going out there initially picking, picking the crews up because I like to meet, you know, who's flying our airplanes. I want to introduce ourselves as like real people. This is a real company and, you know, we're pilots too. And not everybody listens to the podcast. Yeah. Shockingly. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of these people, you know, don't know us from Adam. Some people do know, do know us from social media and stuff. So anyway, I like going out and meeting people in person. You know, I want to see these people. I want to thank them. I want, you know, I know what they've been through. So, you know, I've been through I think five airline failures where I've been on the property like like they have when the airline has failed and I wake up the next day and I don't have a job. You're the commons denominator. Seriously. I am the death of airlines. I've probably had the 11 or 12 under my belt that have gone under at some point. You don't need a job. God. So I said, you know, I wanted to be there, you know, for them as well. I mean, it's a very tough emotional experience. What they've gone through. I just wanted to thank them for what they did for us. And, and you know, and see who they are as a person. I mean, you know, get to know them. Maybe they can do workforce in the future. And so that that was part of it. That's part of why I wanted to drive. And then I was, we got busier and I rented another vehicle, which is like a passenger van. And I started having my son running down. At the same time, I was running down because we had these crews coming in at different times. So, as a logistical nightmare, I didn't want crews to get off and have to like sit around and wait for four or five hours, you know, waiting for the van to come back kind of thing. And again, it was just a just a nightmare trying to get a car service into Miranda and dealing with all that. So, so again, I just I just kept driving. I think I drove back and forth to Miranda at least once a day for the last. I mean, I did it today. Yeah, I think I've done it. I think I've done it every day since, you know, since last one. There's not been one day that we haven't moved an airplane. Yeah. So, you know, in doing that, you know, the drive back, I got to know some some guys and their story and got to know them a little bit. And it was a man that that that was, you know, if there's any good out of this. And it's, you know, it's a tragic story and it's tragic what they're all going through. But, you know, meeting meeting some of them and, you know, I hope they stay in touch with us. They're met some super, super good people. That, you know, I wish the best for I mean, we've, you know, we've talked to some of them and going, hey, you know, we want to help you out. We'll make introductions to, you know, the network that we have. And we have a deep network with with many management pilots through a lot of different airlines, 135 corporate operations. And, and, you know, I mean, we've got a lot of pull with those places. And, and, you know, I want to I want to really help these guys. Yeah. I mean, of course, all of them were like, I love this. I want to just do this. Yeah. They joined. They after they had that that experience of being in the circus or the carnival one time as it's a dictating man, you want to, you just want to keep doing this. There's a lot of airplanes still scattered around the country. That's for sure. Yeah. And, yeah, I, you know, there's been some other companies that have been moving, moving a few of these. It, it does, it has, you know, made me wonder why these companies don't talk to each other or come talk to us and say, Hey, you know, who are you guys dealing with? You know, what DARs do you have where? What, you know, you've got ground equipment already set up. Let's just all work. Let's all just work together to put this, you know, to make it all more efficient for for everybody involved. But, you know, some, some companies just want to do things on their own and rewrite, rewrite the playbook. If we would have had the opportunity to get a strategic plan that that crossed the boundaries of different owners, we could have been so much faster and more efficient. Yeah. Because, and I will say all of our customers, all of the five lessors that we worked with so far on this project, they all had the benefit of shared resources. I had one airplane, Atlantic City is the perfect, the perfect example. Yeah. We had two clients with each with an airplane in Atlantic City that were not talking to each other and we're both dealing with the same thing. And I said, look, I got resources already set up for one. I got a D I R coming to both the same time. We'll get both airplanes move at the same time. That is the only way that efficiencies were capitalized on was when we were working with both clients because we were able to like really kind of consolidate the efficiencies to cities as opposed to just tail numbers. Yeah. Well, that's why I've been working on an AI platform to hopefully solve all this stuff in the future because it's just insane. It's just insane what we've had to do logistically with that could have easily been done if if everybody was kind of connected in some way. What day did I fly? Was that Thursday? Thursday. Yeah. We had one airplane in Philly and I had been saying, you know, I knew there were two in AC and one in Philly and our docket and I said, I'm going to do at least one of these. I got to fly the last spirit airplane out of the Philadelphia International Airport. My home airplane. Yep. That was pretty cool. But that one was kind of a cluster, honestly, because we didn't get ground handling worked out until I was already on site. Like, I mean, we still, when I, we were done fueling and didn't still didn't have a pushback. Yeah. Set up. Oh, man. Yeah. And that was a problem for the previous 24 hours with that. We thought we had one a couple times and they all bailed. I never even heard how you did get that result, actually. So it was an interesting story. So first, there was a woman by the name of Renee. She was awesome. She worked in Philly for spirit. I don't know what her, I don't know if she was a station manager. She might have been. She was some sort of management from spirit airlines at the airport, at the Philadelphia airport station. And then she had been working at that airport for many, many years, local. And, and she had some contacts. And so she was just volunteering to help. She's just like, I want to help, you know, I'm helping you guys out of the goodness. Am I getting paid? Yeah. So she was introduced to me by the client. I don't know somehow the client found her. And she was quite helpful. She got a lot, she got us to the airplane. She got a stairs. She got a lot of stuff. She made a lot of stuff happen. But ultimately, we, we had a solution where we were sitting on the airplane at 11 and we had a pushback lined up for 2 p.m. And another airplane was getting pushed back next to it. us and I walked over to an airport, Ops car. There's a guy sitting in there. I said, "Can you go over to that tug and just see if they'll just push us back? Couldn't we couldn't turn out. We were up against some ground equipment. I mean, we had to be pushed out." Yeah. So he said, "Can we make some calls?" So this guy drives over to the tug. Tug says, "No, I can't do it." And he makes some calls. One thing leads to another. His buddy in American Airlines comes over to the tow bar. I love it. That's how we got out. Awesome. Yeah. That's what you know, with these things, that's what you have to do sometimes. You just got to be on site, like dealing with people instead of these phone calls to companies and all that stuff. Man, you can always get stuff done with-- So you know? Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you just got to have boots on the ground, man. They can stuff happen. Yeah. So we got that out. I landed. I got some video footage of a couple other airplanes landing. We all had dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Yeah. None of these pilots know what they're going to do next. In fact, he called me today and he's like, "I'm on some message board and a bunch of the other spirit pilots are calling us scabs for moving the airplanes." Because of me? No, because they were moving the airplanes. Yeah. They need to be reminded. They weren't on strike, right? I mean, what? Some of these guys absolutely no sense. Such fucking assholes pardon my French. I mean, like what? I think they were just jealous that those guys were able to go out there and fly some last flights and make some money. Just such a great group of people, man. Great group. And just along those lines, Steve, I'm always reiterating to pilots. Develop a network. Develop it. It's all about networking, networking, networking, networking. And the pilots that were good at that and have been networking with me and you, were those pilots that were the initial pilots that flew these airplanes. And the ones that really haven't developed that are the ones that are calling us today asking, "Hey, can you put me on a flight?" And it's like, "Man, we already did everything." But as what I'm telling anybody that comes along and wants to be involved in this type of stuff or even just look for a job in general is go to my kittyhawk.global and build a profile there. And there's a spirit community there that you can go on there and vent tell stories or work, connect other people and find out what jobs are going on. But it's a great way to start connecting and hopefully find some jobs there. But I do have to say there was one guy that there was a 305 area code sometime, I don't know, last week. And I thought it was like one of our other pilots. And it was a guy that said, "Hey, I heard your hiring spirit pilots." And I, man, I didn't want to blow him off. I answered the phone. I was like, "Yeah, we're looking at it. I think everything's filled." And he started telling me about spirit and how much he loved it there. And he was just an emotional conversation. And I really felt for him. And I said, "Listen, man, I'm going to give you an email address, send me your stuff. And I'm going to put you on the list and I'll try to get you something." And so I did. And within probably two hours, we had him on a trip because another airplane deal came up and we needed a crew like immediately. I think we ended up using him on a couple trips. He's just like, "Just keep me on the road. I just keep me going." I love doing this. And he bounced around. He did a bunch of things. Yeah, he was like, "I don't have anywhere I got to go. I'm single and just using abuse me. I love doing this." And he was a real go-getter, just a really super nice guy. And so I do want to say sometimes cold calling actually does work. But please, I can't handle anymore. We don't have any more airplanes at this point to move. I don't even get in our numbers. I don't even know how that. I need to like go on and like delete my phone from the internet. Really. Go to Kitty Hawk, put your stuff there. You can contact me on Kitty Hawk. I mean, I will answer the text that come through there. So. I have so much respect for like the spirit guys and empathy for what they're going through right now. And a lot of them are going to end up on their, I mean, anybody who has a good head on their shoulders going to end up on their feet. Yeah, this is a super great group of pilots. I've said this over and over. This is the best pilot group I've ever ran across in all of these years. They worked for Shitty Airlines, Bob. That's why we're good. We work for Shitty Airlines. I mean, it's so true. I mean, when you're kicked around and stuff, you end up just kind of scrappy and you know, able to learn to hustle, man, and make things happen. And they, you know, they're, I didn't run across one arrogant jerk at all. Nobody complained. Not not one, you know, jerk in the whole bit, man. You know, I'm sure that they're out there. But not any that I ran across. I mean, if you're an employer out there, these are, these are super great group of employees that I mean, you can't go wrong by hiring them. The other night I was laying in bed. Once I finally, you know, turned off my computer and went up stairs and started to clear my head a little bit. I got, I took to Twitter and I started posting a little bit. And I, I posted like a, I think I did it on threads and to where I posted like a five tweet or six tweet. Just a thing like, and it kind of was, I wasn't, I guess it wasn't super clear that I wasn't talking about myself, but I figure most people knew who I am. And I'm like, you know, 50 years old, you know, 15 year captain, like all this, you know, been in the left seat, making good money, living close to home, two kids in college, whatever. But that's the story of like half of the people that I'm talking to. Like anybody who's my age, it was on the same trajectory as me. They worked for the same crappy regionals or flu, the same crappy old biz jets and then got hired. And then maybe wanted to go to a United or a Delta or something like that. But you know, when you're at something, when you're a captain, five, eight, 10, 15 plus years in, it gets hard to say, I want to start over. Well, how do you do that if you're, if you're like, if you're 40 years old, I mean, even if you're, I mean, 35 to 40, especially after you're over 45, does it? I mean, are you really going to go to like try to get a job at United to start over again? I mean, it's just not realistic. And it's, it's, you know, I saw that post that you had and, man, you see me get flamed. Yeah, totally. And I just couldn't believe it. Honestly, I was just like, what really? Like people are going, oh, well, you know, spirits, a starter airline. Oh, like, you know, who would stay there? And I'm just like, what kind of arrogant jerk like is saying this kind of stuff? Like I have, do you, do you fly in an airline? You know, or what, would you just get hired at Delta? You know, 23 years old, and you've never had any real life experience? Yeah, you can see I get angry about these kind of things. I look, I'm a, you all know me. I'm a Twitter few guy. Bring it. And I don't mind getting into Twitter and you know, insult me and I'll give it right back. It is what it is. It's totally fine. Flame me all you want. But I will honestly say it bugged me a little bit. Because first of all, I wasn't talking about myself. And if I was so be it, I relate to that because I was at a spirit type airline. And, yeah, I wanted to go somewhere else. And I ended up just walking away from the airlines, you know, completely to do this. But it had I not, I could have very well been in their, in their shoes. And trying to think about starting over now. I mean, I, you know, I got one kid left in high school. I don't want to start over like it sucks. And even if, and yes, we all know that it's an unstable business. You're not safe at American. You're not safe at United. You're not safe at Delta. But that doesn't mean that these people can't have these feelings. Like people were bugged that I was like, you know, start over 50 year old, start over with a 30 year old, not knows, Captain in the left seat. You know what? Look, nothing against a 30 year old captain. They're in the right place. The right. Listen, I was, I was a 25 year old captain. I mean, so I was, you know, I was one of those young punks too. I get it. And, you know, and I will say stuff, but I get it. I was one of you. So, you know, I might dog on you a little bit. But yeah, just it's coming, it's coming from from a place that I was, I was in the same. Nobody's getting out of this unscathed. Yeah. They could get very, very ugly. And, uh, hey, look, there's, whether you like it or not, there's going to be single, single pilot ops coming up, you know, for all you 20 year olds, you know, there's going to be some major changes in your career coming. So, you know, have some sympathy, at least, for what, for what's going on, you know, with spirit and those pilots, you know, because you're next. Yeah. I mean, it can very well happen to you. Just be, you know, cautious of that and just, uh, you know, have some, you know, sympathy or, you know, some empathy. If you can't have some empathy, at least have some sympathy towards the situation. And don't talk about what they should have done, could have done. I've seen that multiple times. Man up and get another job. Yeah, well, yeah, they will. They will, but in the meantime, it's the equivalent of having a death in your family of what they're going through. There's a morning period for when something like this happens. So let them mourn and you don't have to kick them while they're down. Man, it just really pisses me off to see that. I did that same. But most people have been awesome. Yeah, I agree. There's been some really super people that are trying to be helpful. That I'm sure they're going to try to help these people move on and find something better than even what they had. That's what I think. I keep saying that every airline failure I've been through and I've been through a lot. My next opportunity was a much better opportunity than the one I had before. It sucks getting to that point of when that happens. There's a lot of work involved in a lot of tough times. But man, when it gets good again, it just gets better. Until the next time, but that's life. This is how life goes. But just keep a positive attitude out there is what I hope everybody can do. I've said it. If you get down, I'm available. I've been through all this stuff. I am truly available to listen to anybody that is going through some tough times. No doubt. It's a problem. I just want to answer my phone. Look, we've ran it for an hour and 22 minutes. We were really, oh my God. That was like, are we really going to have enough to talk about for a whole podcast? We had enough. I'm sure it'll come up again. In the meantime, keep your eyes out on the YouTube channel. There's going to be something cool coming up with all this. All your spirit pilots out there. Any more spirit birds to move? We'll call you. We'll do what we can to give you guys a little bit of income and something to do in the meantime. But yeah, take care of yourselves out there and we'll see you next week. See y'all next week. (gentle music)