WOW air

Anyone who stood at a European or North American airport between 2012 and 2019 knows the moment: an Airbus in glaring purple taxis by, and suddenly everyone looks. That was WOW air, the Icelandic low-cost airline that wanted to connect Europe and North America with a stopover in Keflavík – cheap, loud and fast-growing. After just under seven years of operation it was over. This page shows you how WOW air worked, which aircraft it flew and how to recognize the aircraft in old photos with confidence.

WOW air at a glance

WOW air was an Icelandic low-cost airline that flew from 2012 to March 2019. It was based in Reykjavík, with Keflavík Airport in southwestern Iceland as its hub. It was founded in 2011 by the entrepreneur Skúli Mogensen, who owned the airline outright through his investment firm Títan and also ran it as CEO.

The idea was simple and ambitious at the same time. Iceland lies almost exactly on the way between Europe and North America. Anyone who changes planes there can fly across the Atlantic with smaller aircraft of the A320 family instead of having to use expensive widebody jets. This principle was already known from Icelandair and, decades earlier, from Loftleiðir. WOW air combined it with the low-cost model: low base fares, fees for baggage and extras, a young fleet and a brand nobody could overlook.

For a while the sums worked out. In 2013 WOW air already carried over 400,000 passengers, in December 2014 it counted its millionth passenger, and in 2018 the network comprised about 36 destinations. The industry service CAPA even named WOW air Low-Cost Airline of the Year in November 2018. A good four months later the airline was insolvent.

The history in stages

The story of WOW air is short but dense. Between the first flight and the last there are not even seven years – with a takeover, expansion across the Atlantic and, at the end, a long struggle for backers.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code WW: appeared in the flight number, so on tickets, departure boards and in schedules.
• ICAO code WOW: appeared in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers.
• Callsign WOW AIR: this is how the crews identified themselves on the radio.

Rarely did brand name, ICAO code and callsign match as perfectly as at WOW air. For research that is handy: if you search old ADS-B archives or logbooks for WOW flights, you can filter by the code WOW. With flight data from later years, however, be careful – the IATA code WW is not automatically tied to WOW air forever after its end. So always assign old entries by date.

The business model: cheap across the Atlantic

WOW air was not a classic leisure airline, nor a pure short-haul low-cost airline like Wizz Air. The heart of it was connecting traffic via Keflavík. In the morning aircraft arrived from Europe, passengers changed planes and flew on to North America – and vice versa. That let passengers from Germany, for example, travel via Iceland to Boston or the US West Coast without paying network-airline prices.

How low-cost carriers calculate in general is explained in the article How low-cost carriers work. At WOW air a few special features came on top:

• Narrowbody across the Atlantic: WOW air flew most routes with the A321. From Iceland its range is enough for many destinations on North America’s East Coast.
• Leased fleet: WOW air generally did not own its aircraft but leased them, among others from large leasing companies such as ALC and CIT Aerospace. You can read how that works under Aircraft leasing.
• Aggressive prices: The airline advertised very low entry prices across the Atlantic, in some cases so low that observers doubted they covered costs.
• Competition on all sides: On the transatlantic market WOW air met Icelandair, the long-haul low-cost operation of Norwegian and the established network airlines with their transatlantic joint ventures.

The fleet: Airbus in purple

WOW air flew exclusively Airbus aircraft. The start was modest: two older A320s came initially from Avion Express. With the step across the Atlantic, the Airbus A321 became the most important type – by mid-2018 there were up to twelve examples. For the long routes to the US West Coast, A330-300s were added from 2016.

Type	Period of service	Use	Spotter note
Airbus A320	2012–2018	Europe	Initially two older leased A320s, from 2015 newer ones such as TF-BRO and TF-SIS
Airbus A320neo	from 2017	Europe	Only one example, recognizable by the large engines
Airbus A321	until 2019	Europe and transatlantic	Backbone of the fleet, e.g. TF-MOM, TF-GMA, TF-GPA, TF-SON
Airbus A321neo	2017–2019	Transatlantic	From summer 2017, e.g. TF-SKY and TF-DTR
Airbus A330-300	2016–2018	Long haul to the West Coast	Only widebody type, e.g. TF-GAY
Airbus A330-900	ordered, never delivered	–	The order was no longer carried out

At the end, in March 2019, not much of the fleet was left. After the returns at the end of 2018, WOW air flew only about ten aircraft, all from the A320 family: A321s and A321neos. The widebody jets were already gone.

For spotters the many A320 variants are a nice exercise. Whether you have an A320 or A321 in front of you is shown by the fuselage length and the arrangement of the emergency exits – the guide Telling the A318, A319, A320 and A321 apart explains that. Whether it is a neo is revealed by the clearly larger engines, as described in A320neo or ceo?.

How to recognize WOW air

Hardly any airline was as easy to recognize. Fuselage and tail were almost entirely purple, plus a large WOW title. Where other low-cost airlines use a white fuselage with a colored tail, WOW air went for color from front to back. At airports like Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Copenhagen it stood out immediately among white fuselages. The press therefore liked to speak of Iceland’s “purple planes.”

The second feature is in the registration. WOW air registered its aircraft in Iceland, so with the prefix TF-. Many registrations were little wordplays around the family: TF-MOM, TF-BRO, TF-SIS, TF-SON, TF-KID, TF-GMA and TF-GPA are documented in photos, plus registrations such as TF-JOY, TF-PRO or TF-DOG. How the registration system works in general is explained in the article Understanding aircraft registrations.

Route network and hub

Everything ran through Keflavík. Before the end, WOW air served 20 year-round and six seasonal destinations in Europe, the US, Canada and the Middle East; at the 2018 peak it was about 36 destinations. In Europe the network included Paris, London Gatwick, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Salzburg, among others. Tel Aviv was also served; WOW air gave up a connection to Delhi after a short time.

In North America WOW air started in the US in 2015, and in May 2016 destinations in Canada were added. From June 2016 the airline also flew the A330-300s to Los Angeles and San Francisco – a remarkable reach for a low-cost airline from Iceland. WOW air is also documented in photos at Miami.

In the German-speaking region WOW air served Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Berlin Schönefeld, plus Salzburg, Zurich and Basel. Berlin joined the network as early as October 2012 and was thus one of the very first destinations. If you spotted at Frankfurt Airport or Düsseldorf Airport back then, chances are good that a purple Airbus is slumbering somewhere in your archive.

The end: bankruptcy in March 2019

The problems began in 2017. Despite a 58 percent increase in revenue, WOW air slid into the red after the two preceding years had been profitable. Rising costs, tough competition and very low ticket prices no longer fit together.

In fall 2018 the situation became serious. On November 5, the Icelandair Group announced it would take over WOW air – by November 29 the deal had already collapsed. The same day WOW air reached a preliminary agreement with Indigo Partners, the US investment firm behind several ultra-low-cost airlines such as Frontier and JetSMART. On November 27, WOW air had already returned four aircraft – two A320s and two A330s – to a lessor; to that came the abandonment of the A330-900, the end of long-haul service and a significant cut in jobs.

In March 2019 Indigo pulled out. Talks with Icelandair were briefly resumed and ended without result. On March 25 flights were canceled, and a lessor took back two aircraft. The bondholders did agree to convert their claims into shares – but that could no longer save the airline. On March 28, 2019, WOW air ceased flight operations and canceled all flights. Thousands of passengers were stranded and had to switch to other airlines. In a letter to the staff, Mogensen wrote that he would never forgive himself for not acting sooner.

The consequences reached far beyond the airline. Iceland lost a large part of its air connections at a stroke, and the number of visitors dropped noticeably. You can find an overview of similar cases in the article Major airline bankruptcies in Europe – which also includes Air Berlin.

What came after WOW air

Part of the team stayed in the industry. Former WOW managers founded a new airline, first called WAB air and renamed PLAY in November 2019. From June 2021 PLAY also flew low-cost via Keflavík – and ceased operations on September 30, 2025. That makes this chapter of Icelandic low-cost carriers history as well, as Iceland Express was before.

Icelandair has dominated Keflavík again since then. Anyone who wants to spot Icelandic airlines today will also find cargo and charter operators there, such as Air Atlanta Icelandic and Bluebird Nordic.

Common mix-ups

• Confusing WOW air with PLAY – both were Icelandic low-cost airlines via Keflavík, but PLAY flew only from 2021 and was legally a new company.
• Equating WOW air with Iceland Express – Iceland Express was a separate provider whose business WOW air took over in 2012.
• Taking every TF- registration for Icelandair – TF- only stands for Iceland. The airline is shown only by the livery or a look at registration databases.
• Logging a purple A321 after 2019 as a WOW flight – after March 28, 2019 there was no scheduled service anymore.
• Logging an A321neo as an A321 – you recognize the neo by the clearly larger engines.
• Regarding the A330 as a standard aircraft – the A330-300 flew for only a few years on long-haul routes to the US West Coast.

Conclusion

WOW air was one of the most striking airlines of the 2010s: purple from front to back, with playful TF- registrations and the bold plan of bringing low-cost across the Atlantic via Iceland. But rapid growth with leased aircraft and very low prices didn’t last long. For spotters what remains is an airline whose photos now have real archive value – provided registration and date are noted cleanly.