October has arrived. Welcome to Q4, 2025.

Notable in Q4’s arrival is the completion of Q3. Long considered the deadliest quarter in aviation, the end of the peak season often signals the end of some struggling airlines.

This is particularly true in Europe, where leisure demand is incredibly cyclical, driven to sharp spikes during the summer vacation season. Once that summer season concludes, it can be a long, challenging slog until the next peak season.

Take Play, for example. The Icelandic airline announced this week that it would be shutting down operations. The announcement was accompanied by a statement from Braathens International Airways, which has suspended flights on its A319 and A320 flights (Braathens International Airways is not to be confused with its sister company Braathens Regional Airways, which continues to operate ATR72 flights).

For Play, the question posed was a simple one: Can Iceland support two large airlines? The answer appears to be no.

Dominated by Icelandair, the country’s market is a combination of heavy leisure inbound traffic and lighter connecting traffic to and from North America. The growth of Icelandair during the last decade has been impressive. In ten short years, the airline nearly tripled its capacity, allowing the peak summer season to dominate with the surge in leisure travel.

But the story of low-cost airlines in Iceland is not a good one. Wow Air attempted the same in 2012, ultimately ending operations in 2019. Prior to Wow Air's collapse, its managers immediately began planning a restart of the airline, which ultimately became Play in 2021, only to close in September 2025.

As 2025 rolls into its final quarter, the questions have arrived fast and furious on the recent failure announcements. For the year, we count six airline shutdowns: Silver, Ravn Alaska, Play, Braathens International, SKS Airways, and Bees Romania. Of those six, three were turboprop-only operators (Silver, Ravn, and SKS), and Bees Romania had a single A320.

From an industry health standpoint, we’re hard-pressed to even include Braathens International, which was dedicated to charter flying, excluding a single scheduled route.

That leaves Play as the lone, large shutdown of the year, representing six A320neo aircraft. Compare this to the full year 2019, which saw 21 failures, including Wow Air, Thomas Cook Airlines, Jet Airways, Avianca Brasil, and Adria. A year of airline failures, we tend to forget, considering what happened to the industry the following year.

What does the shutdown of Play and Braathens International in the very same week mean for the industry?

In the context of 2019, absolutely nothing.

Research published this week

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