The national flag-carriers and budget airlines might be the first names to spring to mind, but they’re not usually the ones who are having the most interesting time of it. For adventure, you need to look a little further afield.
As nicknames go, “Tango Romeo” is a pretty good one, especially when it’s been coined by a newspaper based on the callsign of your gun-running cargo plane. Buccaneering Jack “Tango Romeo” Malloch established an extraordinary succession of aviation companies, including Affretair, Zimbabwe’s national cargo airline until 2000. They don’t make them like Jack anymore.
Born in South Africa, Malloch moved to Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in 1920 before joining the Royal Air Force in 1943. Following the war, he and his aircraft could be found in the thick of every single hotspot, civil war, and conflict that afflicted Africa. Often in the pay of both the CIA and the French secret service, he supported Mad Mike Hoare’s mercenaries in the Congo, flew gun-running missions in Biafra (a breakaway Nigerian state), and flew mercenaries into the Comoros for an attempted coup in 1977. But he was best known for his beef-carrying, sanctions-busting flights to Gabon from Rhodesia in the 1970s. From here Affretair’s DC-8 jet freighters flew the meat to Europe, earning vital hard currency for Rhodesia’s illegal regime. Jack’s operations have been credited with keeping Ian Smith’s rebel government in power by providing a steady supply of consumer goods, arms, and ammunition.
Jack also had a sideline in gun-running during the Yemeni civil war in the 1960s, was jailed in Togo in 1968 after landing with 9 tons of Nigerian banknotes, and flew a 65-lb coelacanth “living fossil” out of the Comoros in 1978. Four years later he was dead, killed when the Spitfire he’d restored crashed near Salisbury (now Harare). I’m sure, as they say, it’s how he’d have wanted to go . . .
In 1928, the year it was founded, Airwork’s chief pilot, Captain Valentine Baker, had a bullet in his neck. It had been there for over a decade, since the First World War, when he had served with all three services. When warned by doctors that removing the bullet might cause permanent damage, he said “Leave it alone then,” a pragmatism he later brought to his work.
Baker moved on to the Martin-Baker company, which became famous for making the world’s best ejection seats, but in 1936 Airwork secured a contract to open an RAF flying school in Scotland. Another seven schools followed, along with a string of maintenance contracts for the RAF and Fleet Air Arm.
After the Second World War, Airwork expanded into civil air transport, launching a passenger service to Nairobi. Flying twin-engined twenty-seat Vickers Vikings on a journey that took three days to complete via Malta, Benghazi, Wadi Halfa, Khartoum, Juba, and Entebbe, Airwork was able to compete with the 24-hour BOAC service by offering tickets for just £98—a third cheaper than their state-owned rival.
Services to Freetown in Sierra Leone, Salisbury in Rhodesia, and New York followed, as well as a contract to fly pilgrims to and from Jeddah during the haj. Throughout it all, Airwork was busy helping fledgling air forces in places such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, and Jordan, often supplying pilots as well as maintenance and technical support. This only became a headache when, as happened with Saudi Arabia and Yemen in the late 1960s, Airwork’s customers started fighting each other.
With its mantra “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Professionally,” Air America was the granddaddy of all the under-the-counter airlines. From 1950, when it first came under the wing of the CIA, Air America, as it became known in 1959, flew cargo throughout Southeast Asia, including covert missions into Burma and China. It was during the Vietnam War, however, that this ostensibly civilian airline made its name, conducting operations throughout Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. Flying an extraordinarily diverse collection of aircraft, from Huey UH-1 helicopters to the big four-engined Lockheed Constellation—and more or less everything else in between—Air America’s pilots were the only civilian pilots certified to fly non-civilian-certified aircraft in a combat role.
The distinction was, at best, blurred. Not only did the airline fly diplomats, soldiers, spies, special forces teams, and casualty evacuations alongside cargos of food, but they also carried “hard rice,” the code for guns and ammunition.
Air America was disbanded in 1976, only to suffer the indignity of having an “action comedy” made about it in 1990. Starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr., the movie based its plot on long-standing rumors that Air America was used to smuggle opium out of Laos on behalf of local rebel leaders.
Tanks, helicopters, food aid, refugees, firefighting equipment for extinguishing oil-head blazes, America’s Cup yachts, troops, Richard Branson’s hot-air balloon, bulldozers, even a railway locomotive—you name it, Air Foyle has flown it, often to remote and troubled parts of the world.
Launched with a pair of little Piper Aztec light aircraft in 1978, Christopher Foyle’s outfit grew quickly until, a little over ten years later, Foyle secured the deal that made him indispensable. In 1989 he took responsibility for a fleet of giant airlifters from the Ukrainian Antonov design bureau. This included the An-124, An-22, and the world’s biggest aircraft, a single six-engined An-225, which had been built to carry the Buran, Russia’s prototype space shuttle. Perhaps Foyle was always destined to do something a little different.
In 1903 his grandfather founded the famous London bookshop that bears his name, and fond memories of the kind old man at first tempted Christopher into the family business. However, frustration with the aunt who ran the shop like a personal fiefdom, combined with his adventurous spirit and a love of aviation, led him to create the other business to carry the family name: Air Foyle.
In 1947 pilot “Doc” Moor founded Southern Air Transport innocently enough in Florida with a loan from his mother and a leased Douglas C-47. Then, in 1960, the CIA came knocking, bringing Moor’s now successful cargo airline under the control of its Pacific Corporation front company. That’s when life got really interesting.
Southern Air Transport became the first and biggest civilian operator of the Lockheed C-130 Hercules airlifter. Its aircraft have operated out of 100 countries and seven continents, in support of the US war in Vietnam, in Central America, where in 1986 a SAT C-130 Hercules was shot down, and in numerous African countries. In Papua New Guinea it was solely responsible for sustaining drilling operations in the central highlands. Completely isolated by impassable terrain, everything had to be flown in.
But it’s the list of things it carried that most catches the eye. As well as food aid, military men and material, and heavy industrial equipment, SAT has flown breeding racehorses to Brazil, a cargo of lions from Amsterdam to South Africa, dolphins and killer whales, and the Ramses II collection of antiquities from Egypt.
The SAT story came to a sticky end in 1999 when, on the same day that its former parent, the CIA, alleged that its aircraft had been used for drug trafficking, the company filed for bankruptcy.
It has no website, no published schedule, no in-flight magazine, and passengers don’t earn air miles, but Janet Airline, operated by US defense contractor EG&G, has perhaps the most interesting list of destinations of any passenger-carrying airline. If it’s your business to visit them, the fleet of Boeing 737s, all white with a distinctive red cheatline running down the fuselage, will fly you to some of the most secret and sensitive locations in the world.
Operating out of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas since 1972, Janet’s jets will take you to Edwards Air Force Base, the Naval Air Station China Lake, Nevada’s Tonopah test range, and, the most famous destination, Area 51, the top-secret base that’s been home to the CIA’s U-2 program, the SR-71 Blackbird, Russian MiGs in US colors, stealth development, and persistent rumors of aliens and UFOs.
They won’t sell you a ticket, but who wouldn’t want to fly Janet?
US Lieutenant-General Claire Lee Chennault couldn’t have enjoyed a more unusual, interesting, or exotic flying career. Born in 1893, he learned to fly during the First World War, and became chief of the Pursuit Section at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s. His outspoken advocacy of pursuit—or fighter interception—brought him into conflict with his superior, and in 1937 he resigned.
Chennault immediately resurfaced in China as air adviser to nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese war with Japan. It was here that he made his name.
After persuading the US government to provide financial support and aircraft, he turned 300 American mercenary pilots into a fierce underdog air force known as the Flying Tigers, and from 1941 took the fight to Japan.
With the war’s end, Chennault remained in China to create Civil Air Transport (CAT), a cargo airline flying surplus Second World War freighters in support of Chiang’s war with Mao Zedong’s communists. Following Chiang’s defeat in 1950, CAT remained at the forefront of the fight against communism in the Far East.
The airline flew thousands of tons of supplies to UN forces during the Korean War in the early 1950s, and airlifted stores and equipment to rebels in Indonesia. In 1959, as America’s role in Southeast Asia deepened, the CIA, who’d owned Chennault’s airline since 1950, re-badged it Air America, an outfit as closely associated with Vietnam as paddy fields and napalm.
During the Second World War, Don Bennett led the RAF’s Pathfinder force, the men who flew ahead of the main bomber stream to mark the target. After the war he continued in the same vein when he took control of British South American Airways.
BSAA were pioneers, flying a potpourri of old bombers converted for civilian use over new, long-distance routes. (The Lancaster bomber in its guise as the Lancastrian was not, it has to be said, the perfect airliner.) However, the press-on approach that had served Bennett so well during the war was not well suited to running an airline, and BSAA became better known for the mysterious disappearance of a number of its aircraft. The Stardust vanished in the Andes, leaving behind only the unexplained radio message “STENDEC,” and two Avro Tudors were lost without trace in what soon became known as the Bermuda Triangle. But whatever the conspiracy theorists might be thinking, the Tudor tragedies can be pretty easily explained. The maker, one aviation writer reported of Avro’s design, “had made the proverbial pig’s ear” of it. And by 1949, just three years after it began transatlantic services, BSAA was absorbed back into BOAC.
