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Show Notes

Birgir Jónsson has spent roughly twenty years moving in and out of Icelandic aviation — as CEO of Iceland Express, deputy CEO of WOW air, and most recently CEO of PLAY Airlines, where he led the low-cost carrier from pandemic-era launch through approximately $350 million in annual revenue before its bankruptcy. He also led a turnaround at Iceland's postal service and has held leadership roles in printing and medical equipment, giving him an unusually cross-industry lens on aviation's structural quirks. In this conversation, Birgir explains why aviation functions as a closed, self-referential community that makes it genuinely hard for outside talent to gain traction, and why the crew-versus-office cultural divide inside every airline creates alignment problems that straightforward metrics can't resolve. He argues that a modern low-cost airline is fundamentally a software stack — one that is far less standardized than outsiders assume, forcing even brand-new carriers to build their own distribution, inventory, and ancillary systems from scratch. The discussion moves into PLAY's Iceland-as-a-hub strategy between Europe and North America, how the Ukraine invasion triggered a fuel-price shock that broke the underlying model, and why near-perfect execution offers no protection against a single uncontrollable input cost. Birgir also reflects on the manager-gap problem that hits fast-scaling airlines, the realistic near-term role of AI in making complex internal data accessible, and why the durable value in aviation tech has historically accrued to infrastructure providers rather than the airlines themselves.