Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm delighted to be with one of the, I think it's fair to say, rising stars of the aviation world.

He is Aena Ern Oliphson and he is the chief executive of Play Airlines based in Iceland.

We started late June in 21, so we're three years old.

But it was still COVID.

We had, I mean, actually the idea was that it would actually be a good time to start

an airline in sort of when COVID was ending and all the airline industry would be in distress

all the airlines would be you know heavily indebted and and we would be the fresh new kit on the

block unfortunately COVID lasted a bit longer we thought we thought we was just dying out there

in the spring of 21 but then it resurfaced and

really dragged down into sort of end of first quarter 22, if I remember correctly. So the start

was a little bit tougher than we had to anticipate it. That must be admitted. And then actually

when we felt we were really getting off the ground, then we had the invasion

into Ukraine and oil prices doubling or even more than that.

And yeah, so it's been a rough right.

I sometimes say that it feels like the past few years we've seen several once-in-a-lifetime shocks.

And so I guess, you know, maybe they aren't once-in-a-lifetime events.

We are up to 10 aircraft now, and we are operating a hub-and-spoke model with Keplervlovak as the hub.

And so simply saying we basically fly our 10 aircraft out to Northern Europe in the morning,

they come back early afternoon and then they take, well actually half of the fleet goes to North America

and then back.

So that's the hub.

The other half that doesn't go to America basically goes to southern Europe,

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