Google bought Spirit Airlines' data. A startup says much of it isn't Spirit's to sell.

Key points

• Google won a bankruptcy auction to buy a large operational dataset from Spirit Airlines, which collapsed into bankruptcy proceedings in late 2024.
• Springshot, a startup founded in 2011, powered Spirit's day-to-day operations technology for three years, right up to the airline's final flight.
• Springshot founder Doug Kreuzkamp says his company received no notice before the auction and believes a significant portion of the data legally belongs to Springshot, not Spirit.
• Hundreds of airports around the world currently use Springshot's platform.

When an airline goes bankrupt, almost everything gets sold. Gates, routes, planes. Now, apparently, data too. That is the situation Doug Kreuzkamp woke up to when he read news reports that Google had won an auction for a substantial chunk of Spirit Airlines' operational data.

Kreuzkamp founded Springshot in 2011. The company builds software, a digital operations platform, that helps airlines and airports run more smoothly: tracking logistics, flagging problems before they delay flights, and letting both human workers and AI systems, software that can act on data automatically, work together in real time. Hundreds of airports use it. Spirit Airlines used it for three years.

What is the dispute actually about?

Kreuzkamp says Springshot ran Spirit's technology stack, the connected software systems that keep an airline moving, from takeoff scheduling to ground crew coordination, all the way to Spirit's final departure before the airline shut down. That means Springshot's systems generated, or at least touched, enormous amounts of data during those three years.

His argument is straightforward: some of that data belongs to Springshot, not to Spirit. If he is right, Spirit may have auctioned off intellectual property it did not own, and Google may have purchased it.

Springshot received no advance notice that the auction was coming, Kreuzkamp told Ars Technica. He found out from press coverage, like everyone else.

What does this mean for Google?

Google almost certainly wants Spirit's data to train or improve AI systems built for logistics and aviation. Operational flight data, the kind that captures thousands of real decisions made under real pressure, is exactly the kind of detailed, grounded information that makes AI models more useful in complex industries.

But if Springshot's IP claims hold up legally, Google could find itself holding data it has no clean right to use. That is a serious problem: using disputed data to train AI can expose a company to intellectual property lawsuits, and courts are increasingly willing to examine where training data came from.

What happens next?

Kreuzkamp has not yet said whether Springshot will pursue legal action, but the claim is now public. Bankruptcy courts do have a process for disputing what a debtor actually owns before assets are transferred, so there may still be time to challenge the sale.

For ordinary travellers, the immediate effect is nothing. But for the airports and airlines that use Springshot's platform today, the outcome of this dispute matters: it signals how courts and companies will handle data ownership when AI-era software runs deeply inside a business that later fails.

Common questions

Can a company sell data it collected using another company's software?

Not necessarily. Who owns data generated through a software platform depends on the contract between the two companies. If Springshot's contract reserved rights to the data its systems produced, Spirit may not have had legal authority to sell it.

What could Google do if the data turns out to be disputed?

Google could negotiate a licence with Springshot, return or destroy the contested data, or contest the ownership claim in court. Buying data in a bankruptcy auction does not automatically override a prior IP ownership agreement.