The story
The airline was established in September 1962 and started operations during March 1964 with one Lockheed Constellation. and three more were acquired in August 1965. The airline was awarded an "E" Licence in January 1964 to carry out non-scheduled all-freight operations from the UKs Air Transport Licensing Board (ATLB). An application in February 1965 for permission to operate scheduled all-cargo services on a London-Middle East-Far East-Australia route was rejected by the ATLB in May 1965.
ACE carried out worldwide ad hoc charters from London Gatwick Airport. During 1965 some sub-charter freight flights were flown within Europe for British European Airways. A large number of regular charters were operated on British Ministry of Defence of contracts to the Middle and Far East. Routes flown were particularly RAF Lyneham to Malta, Cyprus, RAF El Adem (Libya) and onwards to Singapore. After leasing a Douglas DC-4, this was bought and another DC-4 acquired.
During the 1966 UK docks strike many freight charters were flown from Southend and Gatwick to Amsterdam, Paris and Rotterdam. In May 1966, for example, G-ALAL flew up to five return flights a day from Southend to Rotterdam. Freight charters were operated into Heathrow for Aer Lingus, Swissair and United Arab Airlines.
On 16 September 1966 all operations were halted. and on 23 September, the airline was placed in liquidation after having run up large debts for fuel, and the aircraft fleet was stored until sold.
From Wikipedia’s article on ACE Freighters, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3