Meet the pilots flying Spirit Airlines' yellow jets to the desert

When Spirit Airlines shut down before dawn on May 2, work for pilot Steve Giordano was just beginning. Giordano, managing partner of the Nomadic Aviation Group, told CNBC he organized a massive repossession of more than 20 Spirit planes that lessors wanted returned . In just over a week, he said he and his team ferried 23 Spirit planes from airports around the country to the Arizona desert. Just hours earlier , those bright yellow Airbus jets had been flying Spirit customers. Giordano, who runs Nomadic with co-founder Bob Allen, was starting to hear in the late morning on May 1 that his team would be at work soon. "We finally got the trigger pulled to start moving crews at 6 p.m." on May 1, he said. Spirit shut down at 3 a.m. ET the next morning. So Nomadic and hired pilots — some of whom were previously flying for Spirit — began ferrying the aircraft out West with no customers on board to special airports outside of Phoenix and Tuscon, Arizona, where they'll be stored for now. Retired or otherwise unused aircraft are often parked out in the desert because the climate reduces the risk of corrosion or other damage. Airlines parked thousands of them there when travel collapsed in the Covid pandemic. Repossessing aircraft A retired Spirit Airlines Airbus plane in Coolidge, Arizona, in February 2023. Leslie Josephs/CNBC Nomadic organizes everything from getting fuel for the planes it's flying to ensuring the aircraft have necessary inspections and crews for the flights. …