How’s this for a slogan on an airline’s home page? “Carrying your customers with care.” It may strike you as odd, because the passenger would expect something like “carrying you with care”. But in the case of the UK’s newest airline, Ascend Airways, the customer isn’t the passenger – it is another carrier.
Ascend Airways is both the latest British airline and the newest component of the Avia Solutions Group family. This Dublin-based company is the leading short-term supplier of planes with pilots and cabin crew. This practice is known as “wet-leasing”, or by the acronym Acmi – which stands for aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance. And it has been a common part of the airline business for decades.
