That $3 million doesn't get you much of an airline without some guarantee of profits on the route you're looking to operate though - leasing a 15 year old 737-800 for a year would use up most of that money before you'd even considered getting it off the ground.
Lately, they leased an Airbus A330 for $30k/day (that is $11m). They are also leasing multiple other planes. I guess it's manageable since they are making money from tickets.
I forgot to mention that they enjoy no competition in my town (basically they revived the town small airport) but not much on the rest of the country (being sabotaged by the national airline)
I'm going to infer (mostly from the country code in your profile contact) the airline in question is Syphax.
If the headline figures I've seen are correct, their IPO sold nearly half the company for approx ~$15 million (or about three month's revenue according to their Q2 figures) in working capital.
They have 6 aircraft on order with Airbus which will cost them something in the region of $300 million over the next few years (which they'll probably fund with a sale/leaseback arrangement with an aircraft leasing company because another IPO wouldn't even scratch the surface...)
Those figures give you an indication of why it's easy to get the economics of a startup airline wrong. Imagine Silicon Valley working on those numbers!
