Spirit of America Airlines
Open-knowledge reference entry
Spirit of America Airlines (Spirit) was originally the airline operation of International Air Service Company (IASCO), a pilot-supply and training company, which started flying for package express companies like Emery Air Freight in 1978. It also flew for pre-certification passenger airlines such as Regent Air. IASCO created Spirit as a separate airline subsidiary in 1985, still targeting contract flying, and bought freight airline CAM Air International the same year. CAM was the former Fleming International Airways, which had flown freight since 1973. Both CAM and Spirit also flew on behalf of the US Air Force Logair freight network. The late 1980s saw a substantial disruption in contract flying demand as United Parcel Service brought most flying in-house and Emery, Purolator and CF AirFreight consolidated. By early 1989, Spirit was flying just one aircraft for Casino Express Airlines. It ceased operations the same year.
History
International Air Service Company
In October 1959, former Transocean Air Lines pilots created IASCO to provide contract pilots to Japan Air Lines (JAL). Over time, IASCO expanded its business to include pilot training, aircraft leasing, maintenance, sales and some non-aviation activities but by the late 1970s JAL was still by far its dominant customer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spirit of America Airlines” 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.