A little after 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 8, in the federal courthouse in White Plains, New York, bankruptcy judge Sean Lane hurries into his courtroom ready to face the morning’s docket. Aside from a few law clerks and court officials, the wood-paneled room is almost entirely empty; lawyers and their clients appear via Zoom on large monitors on either side of the bench. Most of the cases concern car loan payments. There’s a 2020 Honda Odyssey, a 2019 Nissan Altima, a pair of Volvos — their indebted drivers all asking the court for protection against repossession. Lane approves the requests when he thinks the debtor can afford the monthly payments, and when he doesn’t, the lender has the right to the car. The judge takes care to explain his reasoning: “I have a playbook, which is the bankruptcy code,” he likes to say. Each time, he picks up his bound copy of Title 11, the congressional statute that governs American bankruptcy cases, and brandishes it before his webcam.

Then the judge comes to the last case on the morning’s schedule. On the monitors, a lawyer named Marshall Huebner appears from the offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell, the elite New York firm where he’s a partner. Huebner is standing at a lectern in front of a wood-paneled wall. It’s a kind of stage set to give the impression that he’s here in the courtroom.

Huebner’s client, Spirit Airlines, is not here either. It’s not really anywhere. On May 2, the ultra-low-cost carrier, after decades of showing America just how affordable and unluxurious air travel could be, announced it was going out of business. The news came a couple of hours after midnight, and it had the swiftness and finality of a guillotine. Not one more Spirit flight would depart. Passengers and even the airline’s now former crew members had to find a ride home.

Although most Spirit functions immediately ceased that early morning, and most of Spirit’s 17,000 direct and indirect employees immediately lost their jobs, not all of them did. Since then, a small group of people has been going about the work of shutting down the company and disposing of its remains.