Matt Walsh

There are many ways to eulogize Spirit Airlines, the budget airline that just shut down operations for good.

The easiest way and the most entertaining would be to simply play some of their most ghetto moments.

And as we all know, there are many, many such moments.

Unless you're a world star power user, there's simply no way you've seen all of them.

Critics might say that this would be a really cheap and insensitive way to memorialize an airline that's existed in one form or another for more than 40 years.

and which employed nearly 20,000 people.

And while those critics would be absolutely right in saying that, we're still going to do it anyway in just a second.

But we're also going to talk about how exactly Spirit collapsed and how this could be a moment to finally improve the abysmal quality of air travel in this country, which, as we've discussed many times, has been in a state of constant decline for a long time now.

A lot of people are saying that Spirit's passengers are going to break containment and degrade the quality of air travel for everybody else because they can't go to Spirit.

Now they're going to go on all the other airlines and we'll have to deal with them.

But there's no reason that that needs to happen.

And at the moment, we're in a unique position to prevent it from happening, or at least to prevent the degradation of air travel in general.

That doesn't need to occur.

This is, after all, a historic moment.

It's the first time that a major U.S.

airline has shut down completely in more than two decades without any kind of merger.

In the middle of the night, all of their operations stopped immediately.

And as the last Spirit planes landed, their pilots and other pilots and air traffic controllers started to get emotional, understandably, on the radio.

Yeah, no kidding.

Now, Spirit began as Charter One Airlines in 1983, where they mainly ferried gamblers to Atlantic City and Vegas before officially becoming Spirit Airlines in 1992.