PLAY

Anyone who saw a bright red aircraft with “PLAY” titles at a European airport between 2021 and 2025 had an Icelandic low-cost carrier in front of their lens that no longer exists today. PLAY wanted to achieve what WOW air had failed at: cheap flights between Europe and North America with a change of planes in Iceland. After a good four years, it was over. This page summarizes what you should know about the codes, fleet, network and the end of the airline – and how to place old sightings neatly.

PLAY at a glance

PLAY was an Icelandic low-cost carrier headquartered in the greater Reykjavík area. The company was incorporated as Fly Play hf., and in everyday use people mostly just said PLAY or “fly play,” after the web address flyplay.com. The hub was Keflavík Airport, through which Icelandair also spans its network between Europe and North America.

The story begins in 2019. In the spring of that year, WOW air had collapsed, and as early as summer, former executives of the airline founded a new company – at first under the name WAB air. In November 2019, it was renamed PLAY. Then came the pandemic, and the start was delayed. PLAY only received its operating license from the Icelandic authorities in May 2021, and on June 24, 2021, the first flight took off from Keflavík to London Stansted. In July of the same year, the airline went public in Reykjavík.

PLAY was never a member of an alliance. Instead, the airline relied on interline agreements through which flights could be combined with partners such as easyJet, Jet2.com or Norwegian – without classic code sharing.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code OG: appeared in the flight number, so on the departure board and ticket.
• ICAO code FPY: appeared in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers.
• Callsign PLAYER: this is how the cockpit crews identified themselves on the radio.

This helps especially when matching old photos with flight data: if you search a flight tracker history for PLAY, you find the flights under FPY, not under OG. How to bring such data together with your sightings after the fact is explained in the guide matching sightings with ADS-B logs.

The business model: transatlantic via Iceland

Iceland’s location between Europe and North America is an advantage for airlines: many connections can be flown with narrowbody aircraft in two legs, with a change of planes in Keflavík. PLAY built on exactly that. Travelers from Europe flew to Iceland and changed there to a connecting flight to North America – or the other way around. On top of that came guests who wanted to visit Iceland itself.

In doing so, PLAY continued a long Icelandic tradition. Loftleiðir made a name for itself with cheap transatlantic flights via Reykjavík from the 1950s, and later Iceland Express and WOW air gave it a try. The basic idea of a budget airline – high load factors, a uniform fleet, lean costs – is explained in the article how low-cost carriers work.

The network grew quickly. In North America, Baltimore, Boston and New York Stewart were added in 2022, followed in 2023 by Washington Dulles and Hamilton in the Canadian province of Ontario. In Europe, PLAY served a series of cities and holiday destinations, including Berlin. In 2024, the network peaked at 42 destinations, and the airline carried around 1.65 million passengers that year.

The fleet: Airbus neo only

Like many young low-cost carriers, PLAY relied on a single aircraft family, and exclusively on the modern neo generation from Airbus.

Type	Role	Seats	Spotter tip
Airbus A321neo	Launch fleet from 2021	initially 192, reconfigured to 214 from 2023	The first three came from the Mexican Interjet
Airbus A320neo	Backbone of the later fleet	fewer than the A321neo	Six at PLAY in Iceland at the end

The launch fleet had an interesting backstory: the three A321neos had previously been operated by Interjet, a Mexican airline that collapsed in 2020. PLAY took them over via the lessor AerCap – more on such models in the article aircraft leasing explained. The first aircraft carried the registration TF-AEW. In 2023, PLAY had the A321neos fitted with denser seating, from 192 to 214 seats.

In the following years, the fleet grew mainly with A320neos to about ten aircraft. The airline gave up on an originally planned longer-range A321LR in 2022 because of rising fuel costs and took another A320neo instead; that also dropped the planned route to Orlando.

A320neo or A321neo? How to tell the PLAY jets apart

On old photos, the two types are easy to confuse: same red livery, same engine generation, same sharklets on the wingtips. The differences lie in length and doors.

You can tell it is a neo at all by the big engines with their almost circular inlet. How to separate neo and ceo with confidence is shown in the guide A320neo or ceo?, and for the length variants, telling the A318, A319, A320 and A321 apart helps.

How to recognize PLAY

Hardly any livery was so unmistakable. PLAY went for a strong red across the whole aircraft and large “PLAY” titles. That set the airline clearly apart from Icelandair’s blue and yellow and linked in color more with its predecessor WOW air, which stood out with purple. A red Airbus narrowbody with an Icelandic TF- registration was almost always a PLAY aircraft in Europe.

Restructuring and Play Europe

Economically, PLAY never really got into the profit zone. Rising costs and tough competition on the North Atlantic weighed on the airline. At the end of 2024, management drew the consequence: instead of mainly connecting Europe and North America, holiday flights from Iceland to sunny destinations in Europe were to become the core business. New destinations such as Marrakesh and Antalya were added.

A second pillar was wet lease, that is, renting out aircraft with crew to other airlines. For this, PLAY founded the subsidiary Play Europe, which received an operating license from Malta on March 27, 2025. Malta is a popular location for such companies in European aviation – Malta Air and Lauda Europe of the Ryanair Group are also based there. Why so many aircraft are registered in Malta or Ireland is explained in the article on offshore registrations and leasing.

In June 2025, PLAY presented an even more radical plan: the US routes were to end by the end of October 2025, six aircraft were to move to wet lease and the Icelandic operating license was to be returned – flying would then be done only under the Maltese one. In July 2025, the airline raised around $20 million once more.

The end on September 29, 2025

It was not enough. On September 29, 2025, PLAY ceased flight operations with immediate effect and canceled all flights. Passengers had to arrange alternatives themselves, and around 400 employees lost their jobs. As justification, the company cited mainly weaker results and bookings than expected – amplified by negative headlines about the airline. The restructuring simply came too late.

With that, PLAY joins a long list of Icelandic and European airline failures. An overview of the big cases can be found in the article major airline collapses in Europe. It is striking how similar the patterns are: transatlantic budget flights via Iceland are tempting, but built on thin margins.

PLAY in Germany

For spotters in Germany, PLAY was mainly a topic at Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Berlin was part of the network, and other German destinations were added for a time. If you took photos at BER, you may still find the red jets in your own archives. Tips for photography there are given by the plane spotting guide for BER and the page on the observation deck at Berlin Airport.

Because PLAY offered only a few flights a week to Germany, sightings here were never mass-produced. How to judge how special a shot is is described in the article how rare is my sighting?.

Common mix-ups

• Confusing PLAY with WOW air – both were Icelandic low-cost carriers with a transatlantic model, but WOW air flew in purple and ended in 2019, while PLAY flew in red from 2021 to 2025.
• Taking OG for a country code – the IATA code is a pure airline designator.
• Taking every red Airbus for PLAY – the TF- registration is decisive.
• Equating the A320neo and A321neo – length and door arrangement give away the type.
• Taking PLAY for an Icelandair subsidiary – PLAY was an independent competitor of Icelandair.
• Taking Play Europe for a new airline – it was PLAY’s Maltese subsidiary for wet lease operations.

Conclusion

PLAY was a short but colorful chapter of Icelandic aviation. With bright red Airbus neo jets, a network via Keflavík and the promise of cheap transatlantic flights, the airline stepped into WOW air’s footsteps in 2021. The shift toward holiday flights and wet lease came too late in 2025. For spotters, PLAY remains an archive topic: if you noted registrations and dates cleanly, you can rediscover the former PLAY jets with new operators today. How to build such a logbook is shown in the article documenting sightings; how to keep following a single aircraft is explained in tracking an aircraft by registration.