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The story
Nauru Airlines was established as Air Nauru on 17 September 1969, and started operations on 14 February 1970. Regular scheduled services commenced after the delivery in January 1972 of the airline's first Fokker F28 Fellowship twin jet, which was followed by a second. A Boeing 737-200C was added to the fleet in 1975 and a Boeing 727-100 entered service on 16 June 1976. Later in the 1970s, the two Fellowships were sold and more Boeings were added to the fleet.
By 1983, the fleet included seven aircraft: two Boeing 727-100s and five Boeing 737-200s; since the entire population of Nauru at this time was about 8,000, the airline was in the position of having seating capacity equal to 10% of the Nauruan population. The airline had a bad reputation for cancelling flights at the whim of its government owners, including using the Boeing 727s for low-level searches for Nauruan fisherman lost at sea while relatives on board were served alcohol by the flight attendants. From this high point (at least in terms of fleet numbers) the airline gradually contracted in size, leasing some aircraft and selling others.
In 1988, the fleet consisted of three Boeing 737-200s with the one remaining 727-100 leased out to Trans Australia Airlines. At this time, the airline was badly affected by an industrial dispute with its pilots and was operating without a set timetable, a situation that lasted for several months. The majority of the airline's pilots struck in May 1988 after the secretary of the Nauru Airline Pilots' Association, Captain Thomas Reid, was dismissed by the government. The strike also affected the island of Kiribati, which provided the fastest and cheapest air link to Australia.
To replace the striking pilots, the airline tried to recruit pilots from Australia and New Zealand, however the pilots' associations in these two countries refused. An agreement with the Indian government was reached to send 20 Indian Airlines pilots to fly for Air Nauru on a rotation basis.
In the early 1990s, an Air Nauru 737 was chartered to operate the Auckland-Niue route of Niue Airlines, the latter company's only service.
In 1993, two of the 737-200s were replaced by a pair of Boeing 737-400s, leaving the Boeing 737-200C to soldier on for a little while longer while the runway in Tarawa was being rebuilt. The 737-400s were built to Qantas standards, and were maintained by the Australian flag carrier. One of 737-400s was sold to Qantas in June 1995 as part of a move to rationalize services. The airline, by now operating only a single 737-400, was corporatised in July 1996 as the Nauru Air Corporation (NAC).
Mismanagement of the island's wealth and the resulting economic troubles caused the airline to lose large amounts of money, and on some occasions become insolvent. Its operations were also suspended for brief periods in the 1990s because of concerns raised by Australia over the airworthiness and safety record of its aircraft. Airline offices and equipment were also frequently repossessed by the Australian government for Nauru's repeated defaults on foreign loans. The airline became in dispute with the Export-Import Bank of the United States in 2002, and in December 2005, the High Court of Australia upheld an earlier decision to allow the bank to seize Air Nauru's only aircraft, leaving Nauru and the island nation of Kiribati without air services. The aircraft was seized by creditors at Melbourne Airport on 18 December 2005. Following the acquisition of a replacement aircraft (a Boeing 737-300) in mid 2006, the airline was rebranded as Our Airline and relaunched on 14 October 2006. Our Airline was renamed Nauru Airlines on 1 August 2014.
Nauru Airlines is now wholly owned by the state and had 65 employees in July 2012.
From Wikipedia’s article on Nauru Airlines, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4