Mooney International says it has bid for Spirit, will buy an aircraft maker, and build a three-airline empire. I called the CEO. Here is what he told me.
The Pitch That Landed In My Inbox
A media statement arrived announcing that “Mooney International has officially submitted a bid for the proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines and its related assets.” That is a striking claim, because Spirit stopped flying on May 2 and is now being liquidated, a wind-down that put roughly 17,000 people out of work. I have covered this airline for two years and had never seen the Mooney name attached to the process anywhere. So I asked for a call, and Connor Johnson, who presented himself as the man behind the bid, gave me about forty minutes today. What follows is mostly his account, in his own words, with public facts added where I could check them. Readers can weigh it from there.
Three Airlines, One Ecosystem
Johnson, whose email signature states he is CEO of Mooney International with a South African address and Seattle area code, frames the bid as one piece of a larger structure. “We see opportunities to create value through investment, innovation and strategic cooperation between Mooney International, Spirit Airlines and SEAir,” he said, “while respecting the unique identity of each brand.” The idea is a single platform tying together three carriers under one membership, what the company calls an Air Pass. The website is already selling those passes, from $450 to $7,500, on a 72-hour “Founder Launch” countdown, before any of the three airlines is operating.
SEAir is the only one of the three with airplanes in the air today. Johnson described it as a Clark-based operation in the Philippines that flew passengers, moved into cargo, and sold its passenger business to Cebu Pacific. He cited a partner’s family link to the Dornier aircraft dynasty, and said the company runs two Boeing 737 freighters with plans to bring passenger service back.
Buying A Manufacturer That Keeps Closing
The Mooney that aviation readers know is the storied single-piston manufacturer in Kerrville, Texas. Johnson says that is a separate company he is in the process of acquiring, not one he owns. “We don’t own Mooney yet. We’ve got a contract for that,” he said, an option to purchase he expects to close by the end of June. He is candid about the brand’s record: “it’s been bankrupt thirteen times.” The exact count is his, but the broad picture holds, as the Kerrville factory’s history is a long sequence of ownership changes, halts and restarts, including a shutdown in 2019.
His plans for the factory go well beyond the M20 line. He described light-sport aircraft already built and sold “across the world,” a return of the MT trainer, a two-place helicopter “equivalent to the R22 beta,” seaplanes and floatplanes, a Cirrus-style ballistic parachute system, and conversations with Williams about FJ-class jet engines. The manufacturing arm, he said, would feed flight academies and supply the wider network.
A New Hub In Mexico And Academies On Four Continents
Mooney International itself, Johnson said, “will be a brand new airline” based in Mexico City. “We’ve been given six hundred hectares of land, which we’re in the process of purchasing now to build the new Mooney hub” at the capital’s AIFA airport, with a meeting set with the Mexican president in July. In the interim, he said the carrier would launch under SEAir’s Philippine operating certificate out of Clark. Alongside that sit proposed pilot academies in the Philippines, Mexico, Florida, South Africa, and, as of [this morning], India, which he tied to “the future pilot shortage.”
The Routes, And Who Already Flies Them
The company’s published network is expansive: 120 destinations, 500 daily flights, 100 million annual passengers, $6 billion in revenue, and 236 aircraft across the three brands. On the call, Johnson put it plainly: “we can do one hundred million passengers a year, and we can turn over six billion between the three airlines.”
The premium long-haul routes are where the ambition meets a crowded market. The plan lists Orlando to London and Orlando to Dubai among its flagship pairings. Orlando to London is already flown nonstop by British Airways and Virgin Atlantic into London. Orlando to Dubai is a nearly 14-hour haul that Emirates operates nonstop as the only carrier on the route. On the Spirit side, the site projects 186 Airbus aircraft, though Spirit left fewer than 100 jets parked when it shut down. Johnson referenced 48 Spirit airframes plus letters of intent on “forty A320neo white tails” and “twenty Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners” for long-haul.
The Money Question
I pressed him twice on financing, because that is the part every credible airline bid has to document. In his email, he put the headline figure near $7 billion and the working bid at $3.2 billion “lock, stock and barrel,” structured as a stalking-horse offer across eleven asset lots. On the source of the money, he would not go into specifics: “all our funding has come from private family offices,” disbursed “in tranches over a five-year period,” and “I can’t really go into too much detail because I’ve signed an NDA.” He was firm that he is not crowdfunding the way a viral pledge campaign tried to. “I didn’t do any pledging whatsoever,” he said though he did welcome interested pledgers to reach out. When I noted the gap between the assets and the proof, he answered with conviction rather than documents: “To me, there is no such thing as the impossible. Look at Elon Musk.”
What He Wants Spirit’s People To Hear
The part Johnson returned to most was Spirit’s workforce. He says the bid is built to rehire staff, with a costed six-month furlough during a transition and retraining to current standards, and he is sharply critical of the bonuses awarded to Spirit’s leadership on the way down. He framed the hardest obstacle not as money but as trust. “It wasn’t raising the finance,” he said. “It’s actually trying to convince the staff that we could bring back Spirit. We need to get spirit into the Spirit to bring Spirit back.”
Conclusion
I came away with a clear account and a set of dates that will test it. Johnson says the Mooney factory deal closes by the end of June, the Mexican land meeting happens in July, and the Spirit bid sits with the relevant legal teams now. Those are checkable milestones, and a financed, filed bid for a US carrier eventually leaves a paper trail in the bankruptcy docket. The vision he laid out is enormous, spanning manufacturing, pilot training, synthetic fuel, and three airlines on four continents, and he made his case for it all. The next few weeks will show how much of it lands.
What do you think?
I got the email pitch. I responded with some questions meant to elicit some sort of suggestion that there was a credible bid, or even to provide clarity on what they were actually bidding on. They did not respond to those questions.
Color me skeptical. Reviving Spirit doesn’t resolve any of the structural issues with operating an LCC. As for those long distance, international routes … remember Global Airways. If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big.