Decline
After its emergence as an independent brand name, Independence Air became known for offering very low airfares: as little as $29 one-way to Florida from Washington Dulles International Airport. However, the company never overcame a series of financial problems during its transition, and its decline started only six months after its launch.
In February 2005, one of its aircraft was repossessed after the company missed a lease payment, after trying and failing to restructure the lease. Later that year, three more aircraft were sold or repossessed and in November 2005, FLYi, Inc., their parent company, declared bankruptcy. The company cited rising-costs in the airline industry as the reason its low-cost strategy did not succeed.
In the intervening months between FLY I's declaration of bankruptcy and Independence Air's cessation of operations, a number of airlines expressed an interest in acquiring the airline's assets including: Mesa Air Group, United Airlines and Richard Branson.
Not finding a suitable buyer in time to keep the planes flying, Independence Air announced on January 2, 2006, that it would cease operations at 7:26 p.m. UTC-5 on January 5, 2006 following a flight from Westchester County Airport in New York. When the airline ceased operations, it employed more than 2,500 staff, many of whom had been with the airline since its inception as Atlantic Coast Airlines. Over its 18 months of operation, Independence carried more than 8 million passengers.
On March 10, 2006, Northwest Airlines bought the operating certificate of Independence Air for $2 million to establish a new regional airline. On March 29, 2006, Northwest reported that Independence Air would be renamed Compass Airlines. The first flight route would be a twice daily service between Washington Dulles International Airport and Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport beginning in early June 2006.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)