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The story
Midwest Air Charter
Midwest Air Charter (ICAO: AOH, call sign: AIR OHIO) (MAC) incorporated in Ohio at the end of 1970. MAC flew cashed checks for Ohio banks before starting doing the same for the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank in 1972, a measure that reduced float. MAC was based at Elyria, Ohio and flew from Lorain County Airport until 1978 when it bought the airport at Wilmington, Ohio. MAC was originally classified as an air taxi, escaping the regulations of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), the now-defunct Federal agency that, at the time, tightly regulated almost all US commercial air transport, by flying small aircraft. On 9 January 1978, the CAB granted MAC an all-cargo certificate allowing it to fly cargo between any two points in the US per the terms of the Air Cargo Deregulation Act of 1977.
In October 1976, MAC started flying on behalf of Seattle-based Airborne Freight Corporation (ABF), an air freight forwarder between 35 airports. In the 1970s, passenger airlines started withdrawing freighter aircraft from their fleets, leaving air freight forwarders without the overnight cargo flights that they needed. ABF was thus driven to chartering capacity from MAC. The need for ABF's own freight flights only increased with the advent of Federal Express and the 1977 US air cargo deregulation and ABF came to increasingly rely on MAC. In December 1978 ABF bought 9.5% of MAC. In 1979, ABF bought its own aircraft for MAC to fly. By year end 1979, MAC had 54 aircraft and was flying to 76 airports and accounted for over half of ABF's shipments. Finally in ABF 1980 bought out MAC entirely, the transaction closing April 16.
ABF replaced management and renamed the airline Airborne Express. Prior to its sale, MAC was doing business under the name "Midwest Charter Express", also the name of its corporate parent. MAC was controlled by M.J. Garrihy and Gilbert Singerman, who also controlled Wright Air Lines, a Cleveland-based regional carrier. MAC had some unusual fleet types, including the West German Hansa Jet and the French Caravelle. See Fleet.
Airborne Express
Airborne Express rationalized MAC: it inherited a fleet of 54 aircraft across 13 types which it reduced initially to Caravelles, Cessna Citations, Piper Navajos, NAMC YS-11s and Douglas DC-9s. It also exited the Federal Reserve contract which had timings incompatible with the package express business. By 1982, it slimmed the fleet to YS-11s and DC-9s (see Fleet). It added DC-8s in 1986. A characteristic of Airborne Express was its use of so-called C-containers, introduced in 1985 to fit through aircraft passenger doors, eliminating the expense of cutting a cargo door in the side of an aircraft. C-containers continued to be used even once the airline acquired 767s in the 1990s.
ABX Air
In early 1989, Airborne Express was re-named ABX Air, to eliminate possible confusion between "Airborne Express" the tradename for the whole company and the airline itself.
Apart from its core activity of cargo transportation, Airborne Express also performed airframe maintenance services to a number of aircraft types. By March 1995 (1995-03), the company had 5,500 employees. In January 1996 (1996-01), the company acquired 12 Boeing 767 aircraft for conversion to freighters. In 1996, the airline ranked number 9 among global all-cargo airlines by ton-miles carried.
ABX became a public company on August 16, 2003, as part of the merger of DHL and Airborne, in which DHL kept Airborne's ground operations and spun off its air operations as ABX Air Inc. ABX Air's common shares were traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol ABXA. In early 2007, ABX Air entered an ACMI agreement with All Nippon Airways to begin flying freight within Asia. The contract utilized two Boeing 767-200SF aircraft. In March 2007, the airline had 7,600 employees.
On November 2, 2007, CEO Joe Hete and the ABX Air board of directors announced that the company had entered into an agreement to acquire Cargo Holdings International, the parent company of Air Transport International (ATI) and Capital Cargo International Airlines for a cost of $350 million. The transaction was finalized on December 31, 2007, and ABX Air was reorganized as a subsidiary of a holding company, later named Air Transport Services Group (ATSG).
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On November 10, 2008, ABX Air's largest customer, DHL, announced a plan to exit the United States domestic market. Previous plans by DHL had been to keep its U.S. operations by contracting them out to United Parcel Service. On March 30, 2010, ABX Air's parent company, ATSG, entered into new long-term agreements with DHL, under which ABX Air would continue providing airlift for the U.S. portion of DHL's international network.
From Wikipedia’s article on ABX Air, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5