This Airline Has Only 15 Planes, And Is Cutting Out An Entire Day From Its Flight Schedule

In the aftermath of sky-high fuel prices killing Spirit Airlines — a result of Donald Trump's war in Iran — nationwide attention has turned to the few remaining ultra-low-budget airlines left to pick up the slack. Some have sprung to action to take advantage of the situation. Chief among them is Frontier Airlines, which quickly (though briefly) offered discounted rates for affected travelers booking through November. Allegiant Air announced a similar offer after news broke of Spirit's downfall, followed by an expansion of its routes — though this was planned well in advance. 

Not every budget airline decided to jump to fill the niche left by Spirit, though. In a surprising move, Avelo Airlines wiped all its Tuesday routes off the map in early May, and the change is scheduled to last through August 2026. Avelo is a small airline that focuses on leisure travel and serves small airports with nonstop-only routes. Avelo's decision is novel — after all, very few airlines operate with a full day each week of downtime — but it's not without reason. While other airlines are cutting individual routes and canceling less profitable flights, Avelo is consolidating its small fleet to better serve certain days. Here's how that works.

Avelo's choice to only fly nonstops that serve the nation's smaller airports puts it in a unique place among ultra-low-budget airlines, but such airports are the ones that will suffer most in a post-Spirit world. In fact, one Pennsylvania hub had no commercial flights on the docket after Spirit's collapse. However, the other factor that changes the calculus for Avelo is its minuscule fleet size of only 15 planes: one Boeing 737-700 and 14 larger 737-800s.

Compare that to Breeze Airways' and now-defunct Sun Country's fleet sizes of about 70 each, or JetBlue's fleet of nearly 300 aircraft, and it's clear that Avelo needs to be mindful of how it competes with other key players. It seems that Avelo's leadership opted for the bold strategy of cutting an entire day out of the brand's flight schedule. Rather than trying to maximize coverage for every route on every day, it's consolidating its plane power to the weekends to offer more flights on high-demand days.

Tuesday is one of the slowest days for air travel worldwide, so cutting Tuesdays from the schedule frees up Avelo's scarce resources to better serve weekend travelers. It means more planes in the air on busier days, which could help keep Avelo profitable. This is especially important at a time when airlines' profit margins are thinner than ever, thanks to the price of fuel. So if a novel business decision is what it takes to keep one of the country's few remaining ultra-low-budget airlines around, then so be it. Air travel isn't getting cheaper anytime soon, so flyers need all the help they can get.