EirTrade Crushed a Four-Year-Old Spirit Airbus for Parts as Pratt & Whitney’s Engine Recall Drags On

An Airbus A320neo built in Mobile, Alabama, in July 2022 and painted yellow for Spirit Airlines was stripped of its parts this May and crushed outside Phoenix, less than four years into a life meant to run for decades, CNBC reported Saturday. The buyer, aircraft parts trader EirTrade Aviation, paid “single-digit” millions each for that jet and a second one of similar age and expects to turn a profit on the more than 1,000 parts it pulled off them, said Bill Thompson, who runs aircraft and engine buying for the firm in the Americas.

The plane had been parked since Pratt & Whitney recalled its engines. Pratt issued the recall in 2023 after finding contaminated powdered metal in some engine parts, and the inspections that followed backed up repair shops and grounded hundreds of Airbus jets around the world. Spirit carried more of that problem than any other U.S. airline, CNBC reports, and the carrier shut down on May 2 after a jump in fuel prices, putting more of its Airbus fleet up for sale.

Twenty-one of the newest generation of airliners were torn down from June 2025 through August, at an average age of 6.4 years, according to aviation data firm IBA Group. The average single-aisle jet retires at 21.7 years. When EirTrade’s deal was first reported in February, Aviation Week said the two ex-Spirit planes, 3.5 and 4 years old and bought from the leasing company Aviation Capital Group, would be the youngest jets ever taken apart for parts.

What the engine is worth

A working Pratt engine for these planes is worth close to $17 million at the high end this year, up 60% from the top of its 2019 range, and rents for about $160,000 to $180,000 a month, IBA’s figures show. At those rates a pair of engines brings in about $4 million a year on my math. Airlines are pulling engines off retired planes to keep the rest of their fleets flying, and the smaller pieces sell too: some A320neo engines have 20 fan blades that can cost $50,000 each, AerFin chief executive Simon Goodson told CNBC. “We always say to our aircraft and engine traders, ‘Please don’t fall in love with the metal,'” he said.

What IBA has said since March

IBA, the firm counting the teardowns, said in March engine values for single-aisle jets showed signs of being “past the peak” and that Pratt was reporting faster repair turnaround, with an upgraded version of the engine due to enter service from mid-2026. Two weeks later it wrote that it didn’t expect more A320neo-family teardowns because they would be “deemed to be economically unviable.” In May it called teardown activity “a reflection of market imbalance rather than a stable market indicator” and counted 413 A320neos in storage, mostly over the engine problems. In February, Roger Welaratne, who runs SAEL, a company that rents engines to airlines, warned that conditions could change quickly once the technical problems are fixed, leaving new investors in spare engines exposed to falling values and lease rates, Aviation Week reported.

Each of those parked jets puts its owner in front of the choice that led to EirTrade’s purchase, and crushing is the one answer that can’t be revisited after the shop backlog clears. A four-year-old airframe, the plane without its engines, has about 17 more years of flying in it at the average retirement age. Selling it for parts collects the shortage premium once, at today’s prices, and each teardown also puts more blades, discs and engines back on the market, easing the scarcity that made it pay. The owners who crush the next young Airbus may sell into a softer parts market than EirTrade did, and the ones who wait for Pratt’s fix will still have a plane.

Sources

• CNBC, Leslie Josephs, “Why popular airplanes are getting scrapped years early,” Oct. 24, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/24/spirit-airlines-planes-scrapped-engine-shortage.html
• Aviation Week, Alex Derber, “MRO Memo: Younger Neo Teardowns Reflect Frothy Engine Market,” Feb. 23, 2026: https://aviationweek.com/mro/aircraft-propulsion/mro-memo-younger-neo-teardowns-reflect-frothy-engine-market
• IBA, “IBA Engine and Lease Rate Update – H1 2026,” Mar. 13, 2026: https://www.iba.aero/resources/articles/iba-engine-and-lease-rate-update-h1-2026/
• IBA, “Popular Aircraft Values Stabilising,” Mar. 27, 2026: https://www.iba.aero/resources/articles/popular-aircraft-values-stabilising-despite-fluctuating-macro-economic-factors/
• IBA, “IBA’s Base Value Update for New Generation Narrowbody Aircraft,” May 8, 2026: https://www.iba.aero/resources/articles/ibas-base-value-update-for-new-generation-narrowbody-aircraft/
• Spirit Aviation Holdings, “Spirit Airlines Begins Orderly Wind-Down of Operations,” May 2, 2026 (SEC Exhibit 99.1): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1498710/000095010326006723/dp246246_ex9901.htm