The consequences of war, economic policy and big business make headlines. They get talked about on cable news shows. They are discussed in board rooms and government hearings.
Those are big-picture topics. They matter on a macro scale but can be hard for people to connect to their communities.
The community felt it in Unity Township last week.
Twenty-five workers at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport lost their jobs in the fallout from Spirit Airlines abruptly shutting down operations. Two more employees saw their hours cut. The Transportation Security Administration has informed the airport it will be pulling out in 90 days.
It couldn’t come at a worse time. Construction is wrapping up on the first phase of a $22 million terminal expansion project at an airport that currently has no commercial airline.
None of those workers caused Spirit’s financial problems. They did not shape the airline industry’s struggles since the pandemic. They did not influence fuel costs driven by international instability and conflict.
On a more local level, they did not decide Arnold Palmer should depend on a single commercial carrier. But they are carrying the consequences anyway.
That is often how economic shocks work in America. Decisions made in boardrooms, bankruptcy courts and capitals eventually land on ordinary people trying to pay mortgages, buy groceries and figure out whether their jobs still will exist next month.
For many travelers, Spirit’s collapse was an inconvenience. Flights were canceled. Vacations were interrupted. Plans changed.
This has a financial cost on people who needed to travel for business or wanted to travel for leisure. All of that has economic fallout.
No fallout will be more personal than that of the people who lost their livelihoods.
Arnold Palmer Regional Airport spent years building itself around Spirit after the low-cost carrier arrived in 2011. Passenger traffic surged. Investments followed. The airport became a point of regional pride and a symbol that Westmoreland County could sustain commercial air travel.
Now the airport is left waiting and hoping for another carrier while employees face layoffs and uncertainty.
Westmoreland County Airport Authority board member Donald Rossi acknowledged the uncomfortable reality Tuesday, calling landing Spirit in the first place “pure luck” and saying it would take “pure luck for somebody like JetBlue to call.”
Small regional airports often exist in fragile ecosystems — just like the local economies and the individual households they support. One airline leaves and the effects spread quickly — not just to travelers but also to workers, surrounding businesses and communities that depend on those services and jobs.
Still, the answer cannot be to simply give up on infrastructure every time economic turbulence hits.
The terminal expansion can’t be stuffed back into a box. It’s too late to reverse course. The airport must continue pursuing carriers. Westmoreland County should continue believing the region deserves access to transportation infrastructure that connects it to the broader economy.
But it also is important to recognize the human cost when larger systems fail.
Economic crises can be discussed in abstract terms. The reality is much more specific. It looks like a laid-off airport worker in Unity trying to figure out what comes next.