When Spirit Airlines headed toward liquidation, the leasing companies owning its bright yellow fleet needed their planes back fast. Bob Allen got the call at 6 p.m. on a Friday: assemble repo pilots immediately. He had just six hours to find 20 pilots willing to fly the aircraft to storage in Arizona.

Allen and his co-founder Steve Giordano at Nomadic Aviation Group had been standing by for months as Spirit teetered on the edge. They quickly assembled a roster of pilots—most of whom had previously worked for Spirit—through a WhatsApp group that swelled to 40 pilots. One had just landed when the call came.

The operation illustrates the frantic logistics behind retrieving assets when an airline collapses. Dozens of planes, scattered across airports, needed to be gathered and flown to desert storage facilities before Spirit's liquidation was complete. The repo men dropped everything to retrieve Spirit Airlines' fleet on short notice.