There are airlines that carry out their duties in a low-key manner, transporting passengers from one location to another. Then there are airlines that seem to draw trouble in the same way that lightning is drawn to a summer storm. Additionally, the Spanish long-haul airline Ultra Líneas Aňas, which operates out of Madrid’s Adolfo Suárez Barajas Airport, clearly falls into the second category.
Julio Martínez Sola and Fernando González Enfedaque founded Plus Ultra in 2011, but the company didn’t start flying until August 2015. The name is derived from a historic Spanish seaplane that flew the first transatlantic flight between Spain and South America in 1926. This is a romantic origin story for an airline that has proven to be consistently complex. With a few Airbus A340-300s, routes to Caracas and Lima, and the kind of slow-building ambition typical of most small carriers attempting to carve out space on congested long-haul corridors, the early years appeared modest enough.
The ensuing decade of legal, financial, and literal turmoil was something that no one could have predicted.
Everyplace, aviation was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are still unanswered questions about what transpired with Plus Ultra during that time. Through SEPI, the state industrial holding company, the Spanish government authorized a €53 million rescue package for the airline in March 2021, designating Plus Ultra as a “strategic enterprise.” Critics pointed out quite bluntly that the airline had been reporting losses for years, operated about 0.03 percent of flights in Spain at the time, and had a fleet of four leased aircraft, only one of which was allegedly operational. It was a stretch, to put it mildly, to call it strategic.
Almost immediately, the rescue was contested in court. It’s also possible that the legal ramifications of that ruling are still ongoing. A formal complaint was filed in October 2024 by Spain’s Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, who claimed that the public funds had been used to pay back loans that had been transferred into foreign accounts connected to suspected money laundering involving Venezuela. By December 2025, the Spanish owner and Venezuelan CEO of Plus Ultra had been taken into custody after police raided the company’s headquarters. Roberto Roselli and Julio Martínez Sola were among those arrested. After appearing before a judge, they were all freed, but the investigation is still ongoing.
Here, it’s difficult to ignore the pattern. It reads more like a case study of how regulatory blind spots are exploited than a biography of a low-cost carrier: an airline with Venezuelan shareholders, a contentious bailout, international financial flows, and now criminal proceedings.
Nevertheless, the aircraft continue to fly. Plus Ultra is currently operating about 13 weekly frequencies in five locations: Madrid, Tenerife, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Caracas. In fact, it has raised some of its frequencies for mid-2026 and just started serving Argentina. That’s either an indication of perseverance or that daily activities are still going on, regardless of what’s going on in the courtrooms.
But not always without a hitch. Flight PU502 took off from Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza airport on the evening of August 24, 2026, with almost 300 passengers on its way to Madrid. Something went wrong a few hours into the flight. Passengers reported odd noises, the plane lost altitude over open water, and the pilot declared an emergency diversion to Natal, Brazil. It was early evening when the plane landed, and no one was entirely sure what would happen next. Passengers reported that the plane was met by three fire trucks and a strong fuel odor.
What transpired was the kind of operational mishap that appears on social media before the airline’s public relations staff has even had a chance to prepare a statement. An elderly man reportedly became ill during the ordeal, and passengers described spending the nite on a parked bus outside a hotel, going hours without eating. According to a statement from the airline, all travelers were accommodated and helped. Many of the passengers had different things to say.
Rosana Annessi, a traveler from Buenos Aires, told Clarín the situation with weary directness: children were among those stranded, an 80-year-old man had fallen ill, and there was, at best, little communication from the airline. It’s the kind of disconnect between lived experience and corporate messaging that undermines trust in a way that is very challenging to repair.
Plus Ultra seems to be in a state of contradiction all the time. Travelers who found the flights to be perfectly fine, even enjoyable, and those who describe some of the worst travel experiences of their lives are nearly evenly divided in reviews on travel platforms. The in-flight crew is frequently commended. Less so are the website, the refund procedure, and the ground operations.
It’s still unclear if the airline will overcome its legal issues and rebuild something more dependable. There is no doubt that for travelers who purchased those inexpensive tickets to South America, there has occasionally been a significant discrepancy between expectations and reality.
