Spirit founder Moreland takes her leave

Victoria 'Vicki' Moreland, well known among airline network planners, has left Spirit Airlines, the South Florida-based, leisure-oriented carrier she helped found. At Spirit, Moreland had served as sales and service director and more recently as vice-president of planning.

The airline has not named a replacement, and Vicki says in an e-mail that she is proud of her accomplishments there and is looking for the next exciting opportunity. Moreland, who led an in-flight service upgrade that helped Spirit gain a following among bargain-hunting Michiganders seeking to escape the Midwest's harsh winters, was a strategist of Spirit's 1999 move from the Detroit area to Miramar in South Florida and of its network expansion into a vacation-oriented airline with national reach and scope. Spirit has undergone a change of control as new investors have infused it with new capital, but network strategy has not changed.