Air Kruise
defunct British charter and scheduled airline
Air Kruise was a British airline established in Kent in 1946. Starting with light aircraft for charter work, it expanded to include scheduled services to the near-continent. It was absorbed into Silver City Airways in 1957.
History
Squadron Leader Hugh Kennard DFC left the RAF in 1946, and became a director of Silver City Airways, as well as setting up his own company, officially named Air Kruise (Kent) Ltd.
Air Kruise's first aircraft was a Miles Messenger 2A, the first civil example of the model to be produced after World War II, which was delivered to Kennard's base at Lympne Airport, Kent, in August 1946. It was to be used for charter work and for pleasure flights. Over the next few years the fleet slowly expanded first with an Airspeed Consul, further light aircraft, and from 1950, De Havilland Dragon Rapides.
With the Rapides, on July 15, 1950 Air Kruise started scheduled passenger services from Lympne to Le Touquet, France, operated as "Trans-Channel Air Services in association with BEA".
In June 1952 Air Kruise took a 21-year lease on Ramsgate Airport. The terminal was repaired after wartime bomb damage, and the hangar was extended.
The public source identifies “Air Kruise” as defunct British charter and scheduled airline. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kruise, defunct and British.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85740229. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1957, 1950 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Air Kruise” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.