Update: Joke’s on the passengers:

Another upset passenger was Will Robinson, who flew into Greensboro from Philadelphia to stay with friends for the weekend.

Robinson said he saw Skybus employees coming off the plane, and some seemed angry.

Passengers in the terminal had already heard the news.

“A passenger who was waiting for a flight said, ‘I hope you’re not waiting for a flight on Skybus because they just went out of business,’” Robinson said. “I thought he was joking.”

We could see Skybus’ demise coming, but as today’s N&R lead editorial says, not this fast. I guess the stranded passengers didn’t exactly see it coming, either.

Of course we’re now finding out things we should have known when PTIA laid out the red carpet for Skybus a few months back:

Before Skybus, PTI had some of the highest fares in the nation, and passenger traffic dropped steadily by the month.

That situation is likely to return. Anthony Tangorra, an airline analyst from New York, said Friday night that the demise of Skybus and other discount airlines could have an impact nationwide.

He said Skybus made a bad choice in Columbus as its home base because too many other airlines compete there. Greensboro, he said, was a good market for the airline.

But he added another factor for its demise: $104 a barrel oil prices.

“That’s why I’m so disappointed,” Tangorra said. “I know this model can work in the United States, and they made some bad choices, and fuel is what it is, and that led to their demise.”

….John Weikle, who founded Skybus and wrote its business plan, said in an interview Friday night that he was in a movie theater when he started getting phone calls.

“I was just as shocked as anybody else,” he said.

Weikle, who lives in Dayton, Ohio, recruited investors and board members, but he left at the airline’s startup last year because he did not agree with the board’s choice of Bill Diffenderffer as its first chief executive officer.

“Bill Diffenderffer was not my choice for the CEO,” Weikle said. “That was the board’s choice. He had no airline operations experience whatsoever, and the board and I disagreed over that.”

The N&R concludes “PTI was right to seek a partnership with Skybus, and Triad leaders were right to unite in luring the air carrier. The Skybus experiment was a worthy pursuit that could have worked in a different climate, at a different time.” Cheerleading right to the end. I admire their consistency.