The company's Chairman and joint CEO was Christopher Foyle, also Chairman of
Foyle's bookshop.
Air Foyle Air Foyle started operations as an executive air charter company with one
Piper Aztec aircraft in 1978. It grew its fleet of Aztec, Navajo and Chieftain aircraft by carrying passenger, cargo and aerial survey flights. In 1979 it pioneered the overnight carriage of courier traffic between the UK and Europe operating a nightly return flight between Luton and Brussels for Skypak (later a TNT company), and later between Aberdeen and East Midlands Airport (also for TNT). In 1985 it started providing larger cargo aircraft to
TNT, by then its principal cargo customer, using wet leased
Handley Page Dart Herald aircraft operating nightly from Birmingham to Nuremberg and Hannover and these were later replaced by a
BAC One-Eleven jet cargo aircraft and then by a
Boeing 737-200QC aircraft wet leased from
Aer Lingus. When TNT announced that it would order 72
British Aerospace 146 aircraft converted to freighters, Air Foyle won the contract to operate these aircraft on behalf of TNT, then an Australian company. This operation commenced in May 1987 with one BAe 146 aircraft and rapidly expanded to ten such aircraft which Air Foyle then operated for thirteen years for TNT on a nightly schedule from various airports in the UK and mainland Europe into TNT's hub in Cologne and later
Liège. In 1985 Air Foyle took delivery of the first production
Edgley EA-7 Optica aerial observation aircraft. Subsequently, while being operated by Hampshire Police this aircraft was destroyed in a fatal accident. In 1989, following two years of negotiations with the Soviets, Air Foyle became the worldwide General Sales Agent of the
Antonov Design Bureau of Kyiv and became responsible for the marketing and sales and commercial and operational management of Antonov's fleet of
AN-124 heavy cargo aircraft. Between 1998 and 2000 Air Foyle bid an AN-124 solution for the
Ministry of Defence Short-Term Strategic Airlift (STSA) procurement. After a protracted procurement process, Ministers in the Ministry of Defence chose a very much more expensive
Boeing C-17 solution. Air Foyle believed it had been misled during the procurement process about the basis for decision on the procurement. The
Comptroller and Auditor General later concluded that the procurement process was "that the Department has not fully followed its own preferred practice in evaluating the Short Term Strategic Airlift proposals, but there is no evidence of illegality." In 1994 Air Foyle won a contract to operate one
Lockheed L-100 Hercules and one
Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft on permanent 24/7 standby for Oil Spill Response, to provide immediate response on a worldwide basis in the event of a major oil spillage. Adopting the TNT aircraft management principle, Air Foyle and then its sister passenger airline Air Foyle Passenger Airlines operated a variety of aircraft including Boeing 707-300F, 737-200, 737-300, 727-200, Airbus A320 and A300 for a number of airline and virtual airline customers including
EasyJet, Sunseeker, Sabre,
Virgin Express,
Debonair,
Color Air, and
Air Scandic from 1993 until 2000.
HeavyLift In 1977, the
Trafalgar House Group bought 90% of
Transmeridian Air Cargo and on 15 August 1979 merged it with
IAS Cargo Airlines to form British Cargo Airlines. In 1978 the HeavyLift division of the carrier acquired five ex-Royal Air Force
Shorts Belfast freighters to operate outsized cargo and spent £4 million on the civil certification programme for the aircraft with
Marshall Aerospace. British Cargo Airlines collapsed in March 1980, although
TAC HeavyLift survived, owned two-thirds by Cunard and one-third by Eurolatin Aviation Ltd. The managing director was P.J. McGoldrick who was later CEO of
Ryanair and founder of both
TransAer and
EU-Jet. The first load carried by a civil Belfast at HeavyLift was containerised agricultural machinery from Amsterdam to Libya. In the early 1990s HeavyLift joined with the Russian
Volga-Dnepr airlines to become the worldwide general sale agent for its outsized cargo operations with
AN-124 aircraft. This was similar to UK rival Air Foyle which was the general sales agent for the Ukrainian AN-124 operator
Antonov Airlines. Volga-Dnepr terminated the agreement in 2001 after ten years of cooperation. The HeavyLift name continued with two new and independent airlines,
HeavyLift Cargo Airlines in Australia and
HeavyLift International in the UAE, founded by former employees and investors. == Joint Venture ==