To understand the significance of the drawn-out takeover battle for Spirit Airlines, a Florida-based ultra-low-cost carrier (ulcc), 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 dc-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
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