Global Airlines claims to want a “golden age.” Or maybe just an Airbus A380. Or something.
The whole thing smells fishy. There are plenty of sketchy carrier launches out there. But none quite so bizarre as this one. Back in spring 2025 they flew two roundtrips to New York from Europe. Two flights. Then they stopped. Why? Nobody knows. Probably didn’t make much sense even back then. They don’t own a license. They chartered a Hi-Fly jet to do the dirty work.
Now the plane is sitting. Parked. Waiting for millions in heavy maintenance that supposedly just got delayed. James Asquith blames “industry constraints.” I call that nonsense.
Ten months passed. Radio silence mostly.
Until I started looking closer.
Money Problems Start Showing
Things look ugly in the UK courts. Two winding up petitions hit Global Airlines after that A380 parked last summer. Dismissed eventually? Yes. But healthy companies don’t get winding up petitions. You don’t see these for flying clubs or local bus lines unless things are falling apart.
Then comes the exit. Tom Stokely left the board. You might know him. Co-founder of OnlyFans. The guy had some street cred. He was arguably the most legitimate person attached to this operation. Better than James Hogan anyway, given that ex-Etihad CEO’s reputation.
Stokely walked. Petitions filed. Make of that what you want. I find the combo worrying.
Asquith’s bank account? Also looking shaky. Remember when The Times named him to its richest under 40 list last year? £183 million on the board. Richer than Adele apparently. This number came from his other big project Holiday Swap. They claimed a £300m valuation back in 2022 a competitor to Airbnb with ten million users in 2023.
Check the list again today. He’s gone. Not there. The “poorest” person on the new list is still worth £100 million. If you trust these rankings his worth evaporated overnight. Or at least dropped enough to disappear off the map.
Wealth is volatile especially when it’s built on clouds.
The Website Just Disappeared
So how is Holiday Swap doing? That “goldmine”?
It’s offline.
Gone.
I checked. The app fails to load. The web page hits a void. I asked Asquith via message about it. He said “redeveloping it yup.” That was the entire response. No press release. No email blast to the ten million alleged users. Just “yup.”
And here is the real kicker. It’s been down for weeks maybe months.
Holiday Swap has 1.7 million Facebook followers. That’s a lot of people. One should have noticed. One person should have posted “where is my booking?” on X or Facebook or Twitter. I found nothing. Not a single comment.
Silence. Total silence from the customer base. It feels like the users were never real to begin with.
Is It Real Or Fiction?
Asquith swears the airline is fine. Big things are coming. Sure.
But look at the background noise. OnlyFans guy left. Liquidators tried their hand. His personal fortune vanished from public rankings. The tech company backing him? Dead online.
It reads like a thriller. Or a documentary about things falling down.
Will we get our Netflix special yet?
