‘A Gut Punch For The Airlines’: Energy Expert Rejects Trump Official’s Claim About Spirit Airlines’ Demise

Energy expert Bob McNally told CNN Saturday that the high cost of jet fuel caused by the Iran war was the final nail in the coffin for Spirit Airlines, despite Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s insistence that the war was not to blame.

McNally served as White House energy advisor to former President George W. Bush, and called the surge in energy prices “a real gut punch for the airlines.”

“In a way, of all the refined products — gasoline, diesel, fuel, oil — jet fuel was the hardest hit,” McNally said. “It’s the one that we tend to keep in lowest inventory at these airports, and especially Europe depends a lot on imports, Asia and so forth. And so it’s the fuel that ran out the fastest and for which the price jumped the fastest.”

“We’re seeing, airlines cancel flights, what we call demand reduction,” McNally said. “They’re just canceling unprofitable flights, even the ones that are still in operation. So the trauma is biggest in the airline sector, and Spirit is perhaps one one manifestation of that.”

On Saturday, Duffy argued that Spirit Airlines had been in “dire straits” from before the war began.

“Their model wasn’t working. They couldn’t get to fiscal health,” Duffy said. “So this was not the impetus. The war was not the impetus for Spirit.”

Consumers are currently filling up their tanks at an average of $4.43 a gallon, and McNally said he did not “have good news” on where those costs were headed.

“Unfortunately, look, the price we pay at the pump follows the global crude oil price more or less, with a several week lag, and global crude oil prices are heading higher, and I expect they’ll continue to head higher this month,” McNally said. “That means that it’s even now increasingly likely we will flirt with — if not make — an all-time high in terms of the average pump price of gasoline.”

McNally said that high was $5 a gallon reached in 2022.

“I think, unfortunately, as we get to Memorial Day or certainly by Fourth of July, the way things are going, we will see those levels,” he said.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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