The Spirit deal is a missed opportunity for creative destruction

significance of the drawn-out takeover battle for Spirit Airlines, a Florida-based ultra-low-cost carrier (), it helps to know something about one of the main protagonists. Even his opponents describe Bill Franke as brilliant. The entrepreneur is now in his 80s, but he once recounted how, on his first experience of air travel, as a young boy flying with his family to Paraguay in 1948, he had to suck oxygen from a tube as the Douglas -4 ascended over the Andes. It must have gone to his head. Since then he has become one of few people to have made billions out of , despite the industry’s tumultuous ups and downs.His secret has been rigid adherence to the no-frills model: low basic fares, lots of add-ons, single-manufacturer fleets, fuel efficiency and strict cost-control. In 2006 his private-equity firm, Indigo Partners, took over Spirit, sold it in 2013 and bought Frontier Airlines, a based in Denver. Indigo has big stakes in Wizz Air, one of Europe’s biggest low-cost carriers, Volaris in Mexico and Jet in South America. This year he went further, orchestrating Frontier’s $2.6bn cash-and-shares merger with Spirit. The aim was to create America’s fifth-largest , a jumbo-sized that would combine networks on either side of the United States with little overlap It was Mr Franke at his intrepid best.