Spirit Airlines left 91 planes behind. So what happens to them now?

Spirit Airlines shut down for good last week after more than three decades of flying budget routes across America. And that leaves a pretty big mess: 91 aircraft scattered across various airports with no airline to claim them.

So what actually happens to a fleet when an airline just vanishes? Turns out there's a system for this, though it's messy. Most of Spirit's planes will end up with aircraft leasing companies or get auctioned off to whoever bids highest. Some might get picked up by other carriers desperate for cheap inventory. Others? Scrapped.

The bigger question is timing. Planes don't just disappear overnight. There's paperwork, debt, and figuring out who actually owns what. Spirit's creditors will fight over assets. Lessors who financed the aircraft will try to reclaim them. And the airports are stuck babysitting these jets while lawyers sort it all out, which costs money and ties up gate space.

A few of Spirit's Airbus A319s and A320s are relatively young and in decent shape, so they've got resale value. Airlines in other countries might snatch them up cheap. But older frames are headed straight to the recycling yard. Aluminum's worth something, at least.

This isn't the first airline collapse, and it won't be the last. But Spirit's failure was particularly brutal because it ran such a lean operation. No buffer. No cushion. One bad quarter and the whole thing came down. The 91 planes are just the physical reminder of what happens when you cut everything to the bone and bet it all on keeping fares absurdly low.

Airport operators are already dealing with the headache of storing these aircraft. Parking fees add up fast. Insurance doesn't stop just because the airline did (yeah, that's a real cost nobody talks about). Meanwhile, workers who got pink slips are long gone, and passengers who booked flights are scrambling to find alternatives.

The good news is this'll probably take months to fully sort out, which gives used aircraft brokers and other airlines time to pick through the inventory. But it's a fire sale, and that means jobs lost, passengers stranded, and a bunch of decent planes getting parked in the desert instead of flying routes.