Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. It’s once again time to look at the airlines we lost in 2025.
There was a little internal controversy here on one airline that I decided to leave out. Should Air Wisconsin have been included? After all, its bones have now been sold again, and it looks like it will be used to run ICE deportation flights for its new overlord CSI, but it technically does still exist. I think the argument could be made both ways, as I did last year when I called New Pacific dead for ending scheduled service. But this year, let’s get more rigid. Air Wisconsin can wait.
Why am I publishing this on a Friday, you ask? Well I had to make sure that Spirit made it through the entire year before publishing. And it did.
To all who worked for these airlines and were impacted by their failure, we at Cranky send our heartfelt condolences.
Airbus Beluga Transport (France) – January 17, 2025
No, Airbus did not go out of business. (Sorry, Boeing.) But Airbus did for a little while try to run its own airline. After all, it has those monstrous, old Beluga transporters that is used to ship airplane parts between suppliers and factories, but it doesn’t need them. It actually has the new version of the Beluga, the XL, doing that work now, so it had four airplanes based on the old A300 airframe sitting around just begging for something to do. With that in mind, Airbus tried to start its own airline that others could hire for sending large shipments that needed all that big Beluga volume. It was like those AN-125 operators that go around the world doing the heavy-lifting. But I guess there wasn’t enough demand to bother, because it is now gone.
VOEPASS (Brazil) – March 11, 2025 (and MAP Linhas Aéreas)
VOEPASS had quite a long and winding history, starting life as Passaredo, acquiring regional jets, and eventually becoming a regional partner for GOL. It didn’t actually become VOEPASS until 2019 when it bought MAP, yet it kept both airlines branded and operating separately. Then GOL was going to buy MAP, but in the end it backed out and only bought the airline’s slots at Congonhas. VOEPASS shifted its allegiance to LATAM, and rumors swirled that LATAM was going to buy the airline. But it didn’t. In the end, the only thing people are likely to remember about VOEPASS is that awful video of one of its ATRs dropping like a rock to the ground in icing conditions back in 2024. All sorts of drama followed, but in the end, the airline had its operations suspended by the government thanks to being unable to meet safety standards. It has not returned to the skies, and I can’t imagine it ever will.
OWG (Canada) – May 1, 2025
OWG is included here only for two reasons. First, that reddish/blueish livery was a real looker. Second, I just find it funny that the name stood for “Off We Go.” But OWG was just a small brand operated by owner Nolinor, primarily using B737 Classics to try to open up a new line of business for the carrier. Nolinor continues to ply the rugged environment of northern Canada, but it thought OWG was its way into creating a tourist-focused airline to warm places. It started with Cuba and well, it pretty much ended with Cuba. This whole experiment was a failure and I guess you could say… off it went. In the end, the airline folded, though perhaps not as quickly as I would have expected.
Sunwing (Canada) – May 28, 2025
Canada has always had a fetish for those airline/tour operators that just have never really worked in the US. Sunwing was born in 2005, and it existed solely to shuttle pasty, white Canadians (or Canadiens, if you will) down to warmer climes. It would fly anywhere, including more than a half dozen cities in Cuba and a place called Río Hato in Panama, among others that you’ve probably never heard of. During the summer, it had a deal where it would ship out a chunk of its fleet to Europe where it would fly for Smartwings. (I had a conversation with a Sunwing crew in Prague in 2024, and it didn’t sound like it was all that popular of a gig since nobody wants to leave Canada during the summer.) Whether the airline was really working or not doesn’t really matter. WestJet liked what it saw, so it bought the airline. And this was the year when the Sunwing brand disappeared and the planes were repainted. Don’t worry, you can still fly to Río Hato, just on a WestJet plane now.
Silver Airways (United States) – June 10, 2025
Wondering if Silver would survive had become a sport here in the US market. This airline was quite the outlier… a turboprop operator with no regional partner agreements in later years. It was born out of the ashes of Gulfstream International, and it quickly moved into the Saab 340 as its main chariot of choice. This airline tried just about everything. It flew EAS service up north, it tried flying for Amazon (which Amazon ended), and it bought Seaborne to expand into the Caribbean. But the bread-and-butter was always that Florida/Bahamas network. There were so many bad decisions made over the years, including the acquisition of expensive ATRs, but the airline somehow kept flying. It finally ran out of steam this year when the place shut down and the airplanes scattered to the wind.
Jetstar Asia (Singapore) – July 31, 2025
Remember when having an Asian ULCC was cool? Qantas was so hot on Asia that in 2004 it partnered with Singaporean interests to expand its Jetstar brand into Asia, taking over Valuair to give its plans a boost even further. The airline would take Airbus narrowbodies and fly them out of Singapore, because what Singapore really needed was more low-cost service…. This, however, was about that time when Qantas thought Asia was the future, and it put all its eggs in that basket. Jetstar Asia served no real purpose in the Qantas world by 2025. You could argue it hadn’t served a real purpose ever, but with Qantas focusing back on its home market much more, it shut this airline down and took the airplanes down under where they can do more good for the airline.
Ravn Alaska (United States) – August 5, 2025 (and New Pacific)
Last year, New Pacific stopped scheduled service, but it hung around in a ghost-like fashion doing charter work until it finally called it quits this November. But Ravn, well, that was the parent airline that had a successful operation in the state of Alaska, providing important service for decades. This is the oldest airline on this year’s list, and it is the one that will probably be missed the most… at least for those Alaskans who depended on the airline’s service. This was legendary Era Aviation, a pioneer in flying in Alaska, until it was renamed later in life. But in recent years, Ravn seemed too focused on this whole silly New Pacific venture. It also spent too much money on search-and-rescue operations looking for the missing “e” in its name. Then one day, the airline shut down abruptly leaving New Pacific alone flying charters. Now that’s gone too.
WizzAir Abu Dhabi (UAE) – September 1, 2025
Wizz had an idea. What if the airline bought A321neos with long legs and used those to bring low fares to Europe and possibly anywhere else within range? The answer was… nothing good. It would not work. Wizz hit a lot of headwinds, to be sure. The war in Gaza certainly did not help to create efficient routings, and the punishing desert climate did a real number on those fragile Pratt & Whitney engines. They proved to be far from durable under those extreme conditions. It was all just a silly lark for the airline which was never going to make its Abu Dhabi operation into something massive like it had in Europe anyway. So, it made the smart move to shut it down and bring the planes back to Europe.
PLAY (Iceland) – September 28, 2025
Didn’t PLAY already die? Oh wait, no, that was WOW that failed previously. This was the exact same thing, just without the widebodies. The problem is, there was never room for two big airlines using Iceland as a Transatlantic hub anyway. PLAY focused more on Europe and less on the Transatlantic market, but it did some of that flying too until it abruptly stopped that last year. In the end, none of it worked, so it tried to pivot into more of a leisure carrier focusing on bringing Icelanders to warmer weather. Whether that could have worked or not, the pivote probably came too late. Now PLAY is done, and we are just waiting to see when COOL starts up out of the ashes. There’s always somebody that thinks they know better.
Eastern Airways (United Kingdom) – October 27, 2025
The failure of Eastern in the UK brings up a very important question. Just how many times can an airline with the name Eastern fail? This one had a decently successful life for many years as a regional buzzing around the UK. It was loyal to the crown, even operating those impressively uncomfortable British-built BAe Jetstream 41s until the bitter end. But it did have jets and other props from time to time. At one point, Eastern did flying on behalf of British Airways. Before the pandemic, it had entered into an agreement to fly under the flybe name. And in the last year, it even did some flying for KLM. All of this looked like an airline hoping to find its golden ticket. Considering all those partnership and a reliance on government-funded routes, it’s perhaps no surprise that things didn’t work out.
Blue Islands (Guernsey) – November 14, 2025
In that same part of the world, but NOT in the United Kingdom, we saw Blue Islands fail. Blue Islands was a lifeline for the good people of those goofy Channel Islands, most flying into the UK but also into the Continent. For some reason, Blue Islands decided it didn’t like its original name of Le Cocq’s Airlink, which I can’t understand. Had it kept that name, it’s safe to say the airline never would have failed. Blue Islands was another operator that followed the same path as Eastern did in the UK, entering into an agreement to fly under the flybe name before the pandemic. It came back on its own after that airline failed during the pandemic, but it could never quite repay those COVID loans. Now Aurigny alone has to carry the flag.
Air Albania (Albania) – December 7, 2025
This is a very sad story. Oh sure, it’s sad that Albania’s flag carrier failed, but my guess is that it was a bloated company that flew places it didn’t need with a tiny fleet. What’s sad is that this now leaves Albania without a single commercial airline based in the country. This airline was built as a joint venture with Turkish Airlines when that airline wanted to expand its reach regionally. It never really grew into anything significant. When Turkish announced this year it wanted out, well, we all could have figured out how it was going to end. Air Albania collapsed. With Albawings having failed previously, Wizz and Ryanair are the only two significant operators in the country now. Then again, that was the case when Air Albania was flying anyway.
Tomb of the Unknown Airline
- Aeroexpress Regional (Hungary)
- Aerolínea Lanhsa (Honduras)
- Air Antilles (France)
- Angara Airlines (Russia)
- Armenian Airlines (Armenia)
- Braathens International Airways (Sweden)
- Cham Wings (Syria)
- Eastwind Aviation (Nigeria)
- Georgian Wings (Georgia)
- Joy Air (China)
- Kenai Aviation (United States)
- Loch Lomond Seaplanes (Scotland)
- Lumiwings (Greece)
- Mýflug AIR (Iceland)
- NovAir (Armenia)
- OmniBlu Aviation (Nigeria)
- SmartLynx (Latvia)
- Tindal Air (Australia)
- Trans Am Aero Express (Ecuador)
- True Air (Malaysia)
