Cargolux Airlines Int.

Cargolux was founded in May 1970. It can be said that Cargolux was founded upon the 44. In the late sixties Loftleiğir was looking for alternatives to replace the CL-44´s but did not find any buyers. Through co-incident the person in charge of investigating disposal possebilities for the aircraft ran into the owner of the Salen Shipping company. The idea was to found a company to carry airfreight that needed quick transport and a trip by ship would be too time consuming. Cargolux was founded and the two parties chose Luxembourg as base since Loftleiğir had used Luxembourg as their European hub with maintenance facilities for the CL-44. Local partners were found in order to set up a proper Luxembourg registered company. One of those was the local flag carrier Luxair.
Cargolux operated all of Loftleidir´s CL-44s and even added a sixth CL-44D4 from Seaboard as a replacement for the lost (c/n 36 TF-LLG) which crashed upon approach near Dacca. In the beginning Cargolux mostly flew ad-hoc charter flights and humanitary missions. In 1972 Cargolux started to fly scheduled cargo flights to the far east with Hong Kong being the most important hub. The CL-44 operation was highly successful and Cargolux added numerous DC-8-63 to their fleet. In 1974 Cargolux opened their maintenance centre to maintain their fleet to CL-44 and DC-8. Cargolux maintenance standard on the CL-44 was very high and they pioneered in developing and carry out modifications in order to improve the CL-44´s safety and performance. A necessary step since hardly any airworthiness directives were issued due to the small number of aircraft built. The last CL-44 was phased out in 1978. A year earlier, 1977, Cargolux had ordered their first 747-200F, delivered in 1979. The last DC-8 was phased out in 1984. Ever since Cargolux has operated a fleet of 747 freighters and the company has been very successful in the all-cargo market. Today Cargolux operates 10 own 747-400F and more are flying on sub-contracts. More 747-400F are on order from Boeing.

For more information on Cargolux Airlines please contact http://www.cargolux.com