Business life: My finance news blog

Spirit Airlines and its striking pilots agreed to meet with mediators today, the union said, signaling a potential thaw that would be welcomed by the thousands of customers holding tickets on the grounded airline.

Sean Creed, head of the pilots union at Spirit, said the National Mediation Board has asked both sides to meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. However, union officials said the strike would continue until they approve any deal.

Spirit said it wouldn’t fly until Thursday at the earliest, forcing its roughly 16,000 daily passengers to get where they were going by rental car or an expensive walk-up fare on another airline. Spirit carries just 1 percent of the nation’s air traffic, but those travelers have been 100 percent grounded by the pilots’ walkout.

Spirit aircraft have not flown since pilots walked out Saturday in a pay dispute. Just a few days before the strike, the airline was saying it would fly through it. That didn’t happen. It has said it would try to get passengers onto flights on other airlines payday loans for bad credit. Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson declined to say Monday how many passengers had gotten seats on other carriers with Spirit’s help.

Spirit has said its last offer would have raised pilots’ pay by 29 percent over five years, although pilots would have to work more to get that money. Pilots have been negotiating for more than three years, and they have said the proposed raise works out to less than 4 percent per year.

Pilots have said their pay should be similar to that of pilots at other discount airlines such as JetBlue Airways and AirTran Airways, a unit of AirTran Holdings Inc. The company has said those airlines are much bigger than Spirit.

Privately held Spirit is based in Miramar, Fla., and ended 2009 with $139.5 million in cash and short-term investments, according to filings with the government.

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