Ever wonder what happens when an airline completely runs out of money?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]I want to say it was almost 10 years ago there used to be an airline based in Germany called Air Berlin um and they had similar [music] to Spirit, very serious financial issues. I was supposed to fly home from Germany one day and I got to the airport and they hadn't quite gone out of business yet. They also hadn't paid their [music] pilots in a while and so like 300 of their pilots called out sick one day and so all of their flights got cancelled and I was stuck in Germany. There were no customer service people to help us. We were really on our own. And so that's what usually happens in these [music] cases.

[00:00:31]Customers are left to fend for themselves. It's really just because the airline completely runs out of money because usually an airline winds down because they've completely run out of money. They can't purchase fuel uh and then they're not able to operate their flight.