IAS Cargo Airlines

International Aviation Services Ltd was an air transport consultancy formed in 1966. It commenced worldwide cargo charters from London Gatwick in 1967 with leased, second-hand Bristol Britannia 300F turboprop equipment.[nb 2][5][6] It began replacing leased equipment with its own aircraft in 1971, acquired its own air operator's certificate in June 1972 in the name of International Aviation Services (UK) Ltd[6] and adopted the IAS Cargo Airlines trading name four years later.[1]

IAS Cargo Airlines acquired additional, second-hand Britannia turboprop freighters as well as a Canadair CL-44 "swing tail" freighter during the early 1970s to expand its fleet in response to growing worldwide demand for its pure freight services.

When the world's major scheduled airlines began re-equipping their fleets with new generation widebodied jet aircraft from the early 1970s, a growing number of older generation, narrow-bodied jet planes, such as the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8, became available on the second-hand market at prices smaller airlines that were lacking the resources to invest in new equipment could afford.

IAS Cargo Airlines became one of these smaller airlines that took advantage of this situation by purchasing its first DC-8-50F jet freighter in 1974.[1] Jet operations commenced the following year.[7] As business continued to expand, it introduced further DC-8-50Fs into its fleet during the second half of the 1970s.

By the end of the 1970s the company's fleet mainly consisted of DC-8-50Fs. By that time it was receiving a growing number of air freight consignments that were shipped to its Gatwick base from the "other side" of the Channel. In October 1978 the firm introduced its first larger capacity, "stretched" DC-8 "Super Sixty" series freighter, a -62CF wet-leased from Finnair.[8]

Stansted-based Trans Meridian Air Cargo (TMAC), another small independent UK all-cargo operator wholly owned by Trafalgar House subsidiary Cunard Steamship Co,[9] had come into being in 1962.[10] TMAC also operated a similar aircraft fleet consisting of the same aircraft types, including a pair of DC-8Fs.[11][12] Therefore, combining both companies' businesses to achieve greater operational synergies as well as to attain greater economies of scale seemed to be the next "logical" step to ensure survival in a competitive market place dominated by bigger, more powerful rivals.

IAS Cargo Airlines merged with TMAC on 15 August 1979 to create British Cargo Airlines, which began trading under its new name five days later.[13] The merged entity's fleet comprised 15 aircraft, including eight DC-8 jet freighters, six CL-44-D and one CL-44-0 turboprop freighters. The jets were based at Gatwick while the turboprops were stationed at Stansted.[2][3][4][9][12][14][15]

The newly created British Cargo Airlines only had a brief life. It folded in March 1980.[3][4][13][16]

The main reasons for the combined entity's collapse included:

• A deep recession in Britain, which affected UK-based manufacturing companies that were the airline's main customers. This caused a slump in those companies' output of manufactured goods and led to a collapse in demand for specialist air freight services.
• Steeply rising jet fuel prices in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah of Iran. This increased the operating costs of relatively fuel-thirsty narrow-bodied jet freighters such as the Boeing 707 and the DC-8 (compared with more fuel-efficient widebodied freighters).
• A big influx of long-haul widebodied aircraft capacity into the fleets of British Airways and British Caledonian, Britain's two principal scheduled airlines at the time, as well as their main overseas competitors' fleets during the late 1970s/early 1980s. This resulted in a major increase in bellyhold cargo capacity that cost freight forwarders and shippers less to fill (compared with the higher rates that were required to fill narrow-bodied pure freighters profitably).