Fursty Ferret, no front line employee knew until the 11th hour I assure you. This is a new operation with the vast majority of FOs having no prior TA experience. No surprises the voice reports were a bit rough!
As someone who spent 6 months there (I left when the agency cocked up everything they could with my pay, contract, parking), here's my view of things:
Firstly, I think (but not sure) that the parent company purchased and owns the planes. They have either "sold" them in order to lease them back or have leased them directly to the airline. Airbus and Boeing heavily discounted the planes as they thought they had what was a trusty partner to show case their latest green-jets. If the parent company is still the owner of those planes, they can be sold for a tidy profit indeed especially because of all the delays other airlines are experiencing.
However, as posted on here by someone, Primera had some highly dodgy employment practices and were about to be handed it to them by a Danish union. Separately, the Icelandic owned, Malta based but UK head quartered employment agency that recruited and employed every person working the transatlantic operation and some Boeing pilots too (
ASTA - run by the same mob that runs Mountain High) applied a very amateurish understanding of UK employment law. They screwed up by thinking they could deduct an employees annual leave provision from their contracted days off per month! That's right, pilots and cabin crew found back in June that because they requested 5 days leave, they had 5 off days missing! This sounds outrageous, but it's true and apparently quite normal in some European countries.
Because of this cockup, they had to ramp up recruitment resulting in a much higher wage bill.
The contracts were poorly worded and amateurish and a constant source of consternation. They completely forgot about parking then retrospectively advised that money would deducted from salaries to pay for airport parking. Also, there was a massive issue with overtime payments. In the first month of operation, there was going to be a mass exodus over this. In the end, when pilots and cabin crew threatened action, the agency had no choice but to accept they made a mistake by not paying crew the "double" rate that was promised in the contract. All of this dealing another blow to their projection of how much profit they as an airline would make. All in all, Primera/ASTA misjudged how much the wage bill could be.
The reality of running a longhaul operation (and I'm no expert), especially one that flies mostly throughout the night is that you exhaust the hell out of crew who end up calling in fatigued/sick. You then pay others thousands in overtime and suddenly it all becomes unaffordable. Towards the end some people were making double their basic in over time alone. Good for them, but not sustainable for the company. As a low cost operator, margins are tight and my conclusion is that the Icelandic management saw it was not going to be viable in the long term.
Rumour within the company was because of the discounts, there were limited delay penalty clauses. So the sub-chartering most likely did have a massive, unrecoverable impact. One thing's for sure. The A321Neo has no problems carrying a full load of passengers and fuel between the East Coast and Western Europe. Airbus got it right and the the 737 Max has big boots to fill. Whether or not it can fly across the pond cheaply is not just linked to how fuel efficient the aircraft is but also what the front-line (operating) staff are prepared to put up with contract/pay wise. I think we have now reached the point where airline ticket prices cannot go any lower because the human beings responsible for delivering the service want to be paid a decent wage. Finally!
Happy to be corrected by people in the know on anything I've said above.