Last week WOW Air finally collapsed. The Iceland-based airline was founded in 2011, and their business model has been based around connecting people between North America and Europe via their hub in Keflavik, Iceland.
Why the airline failed depends on who you ask. If you ask the pilots, it’s the fault of journalists. If you ask the CEO, it’s because they made the mistake of ordering A330s. If you ask most people, it’s simply because the overall business model didn’t make sense given the competitive landscape.
It sure felt like WOW Air was holding on longer than they should have, as the writing was on the wall for their collapse for quite a while.
But that’s not stopping former WOW Air CEO Skúli Mogensen from trying to resurrect the airline. I guess he’s one of those people who subscribes to the “you can’t lose if you don’t quit” mentality.
As reported by Iceland Monitor, the former WOW Air CEO is looking for 40 million USD to be able to resurrect the airline, and in return he’s offering a 49% stake in the company.
As before, the company would be based on a low cost model, though their approach would be a bit different:
- They’d initially operate charter flights using five Airbus aircraft, as a basis for obtaining an operating certificate, and also for buying back major asserts from WOW Air’s estate, including the company’s trademark
- The plan is that WOW Air would expand much faster than previously, and they’d have seven Airbus planes in operation by next year; for the previous version of WOW Air, it took five years for them to get that many planes
Frankly I think the odds of this working are very low, and if someone did want to invest 40 million for a non-majority stake in an airline, I feel like there are better options than working with Skúli, who doesn’t exactly have an amazing track record.
I’ll be curious to see if anything comes of this…
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