Ameriflight

History

Ameriflight was established in 1968 as California Air Charter. It merged in 1971 with United Couriers (UCI), a wholly owned subsidiary of ATI Systems International (ATIS). In April 1993 the fixed-wing division of Wings Express (which was based at Van Nuys Airport) was purchased, and the outstanding shares of Sports Air Travel were acquired in mid-1997. In March 2007, when Canadian company Garda Security bought ATIS, Ameriflight was sold to a group of investors including the company's president, Gary Richards.

In May 2014 the airline announced it was moving its headquarters to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Maintenance operations and flight operations are scheduled to move to DFW.

In late 2014 Ameriflight reached agreement to acquire Wiggins Airways (48 aircraft and 100 employees), which would result in Ameriflight becoming the largest regional air cargo carrier in the world with 218 aircraft in its fleet.

Flight services

The majority of Ameriflight's operations consists of air feeder service for major package express integrators such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL. Other significant customers include Lantheus Medical Imaging, ACS Products, and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. On schedules set by the customers, cargo is received in the early morning from large jet freighters at hub airports and distributed by Ameriflight airplanes to smaller communities whose traffic (or airports) would not support the big airplanes. In the evening, the Ameriflight aircraft fly back to the hubs, in order to feed them with cargo from the smaller communities, which is carried onwards to the integrators' distribution centers for sorting and redistribution to the ultimate destinations.

Although demand is decreasing as use of digital imaging and electronic data transfer increases, Ameriflight also transports high priority intercity financial documents. Pharmaceuticals, film for development, medical laboratory samples, and other miscellaneous cargo are also carried.

Ameriflight is one of the few Part 135 cargo carriers in the U.S. with a special Department of Transportation permit to carry high Transport Index radioactive cargo, an important element in the company's time-critical radioactive medical raw materials business, which transports radioactive "generator" materials between points of manufacture and cities where it is used to produce materials used in diagnostics and cancer therapy.

In addition to scheduled flying (with contract schedules set by customers), all Ameriflight bases can respond to unscheduled on-demand cargo flights to destinations in Alaska, Canada, throughout the contiguous U.S., Mexico, the Caribbean, and into South America. A single King Air 200 is used for on-demand passenger charter flights.

Main bases and hubs

As of early 2016, Ameriflight's headquarters are at Dallas' Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, with large operations centers at the following 19 bases:

Fleet

The Ameriflight fleet includes the following aircraft (as of August 2016):

Ameriflight's fleet previously consisted of seven aircraft types with cargo capacities ranging from 1,700 to 8,000 pounds.

They include:

Fleet Total: 218

In previous times, the airline operated the following aircraft types: Cessna 402, Cessna 208 Caravan, Dassault Falcon 20, de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, Learjet 35A, Mitsubishi MU-2, Piper PA-32R, Piper PA-32, Piper PA-28, Piper PA-23 and Piper PA-31T Cheyenne.

Accidents and incidents