Get ready to fly the “really cool” skies, maybe, after the former head of Nok Air announced today that he is launching a new airline that hopefully flies better than its name.
Five years after he left Nok, Patee Sarasin’s announcement today of “Really Cool Airlines” was so chockablock with scam-adjacent, threadbare buzzwords such as gamification, blockchain, and NFTs that it might be mistaken as satire to anyone who has paid attention to the past two years.
Announced as the world’s first “GameFi airline” (customers will play blockchain games!), Patee said Really Cool would be managed by “crypto-native citizens from our Really Cool Air GameFi.”
Every airline needs a pithy slogan, and Really Cool’s is “We fly the future.”
Though Patee promised to launch long-haul flights to Australia and Europe, only time will tell if an actual airline ever gets off the ground. Today’s announcement was geared toward attracting investors so that they can buy four planes from Airbus by the end of next year.
Patee presided over a tumultuous period for Nok. He had to personally apologize multiple times when thousands of passengers were stranded in 2016 because many flights were canceled. Pilots quit in droves and the airline struggled to keep its planes in the air. Patee later denied allegations that its planes were being flown by unqualified trainees.
Since he left Nok in 2018, Patee had been running a travel agency called Really Really Cool, suggesting his new airline is slightly less cool than possible.
