AS IS ALWAYS the case when an airline goes bust, the collapse of WOW Air, an Icelandic low-cost carrier, has left a trail of financial destruction at home and abroad. More than 1,000 airline employees have lost their jobs. Tens of thousands of customers will face a battle to recover money spent on unused tickets. Those in the middle of their trips are stranded. With a population of less than 350,000 people, Iceland’s economy is neither large enough nor diversified enough to shrug off the failure. Last year the government warned that WOW’s collapse would shrink GDP and send the krona, the local currency, plummeting.

Skuli Mogensen, WOW’s founder and sole shareholder, had in recent months seemed like the airline industry’s answer to Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, who is desperately trying to get her Brexit deal ratified before the country leaves the European Union. Mr Mogensen steered the lossmaking company through crisis after crisis, trying to negotiate a bailout first with Icelandair, the flag carrier, then Indigo Partners, an American private-equity firm, and then Icelandair again. His last roll of the dice was an attempt to convince bondholders to convert their debt into shares. But none of the partnership talks bore fruit and the airline ran out of runway when aircraft lessors pulled their support.

That is a shame. WOW’s basic business model was sound: offer cheap and cheerful flights between Europe and America with a stop in Reykjavik, Iceland’s mid-Atlantic capital. The use of cheaper short-haul planes gave WOW an edge over low-cost, long-haul rivals such as Norwegian, which uses more expensive planes designed for long-haul routes. The strategy was pioneered by Loftleidir, a precursor to Icelandair, in the 1960s. It will surely be tried again in the future. But in WOW’s case it did not work because the company grew too fast and lacked sufficient financial backing to get it through the lean winter season.

Whatever the personal cost to Mr Mogensen—he told Icelandic media he invested “everything I have” in the airline—WOW’s founder will be savaged by the press. Which?, a consumer group based in Britain, has slammed the company for continuing to sell tickets on its website even after its planes were grounded. When local media warned potential flyers of the perilous outlook, one of the company’s trade unions hit back with accusations of irresponsible journalism. That was absurd. Reporters have a duty to warn passengers that they could be throwing their money away. Policymakers should look at ways of protecting such consumers during future airline bankruptcies, for instance by increasing their priority in the distribution of assets when such a company is liquidated. With over a dozen airline failures in Europe since the beginning of 2018, WOW is unlikely to be the last airline to go bust this year.