Having failed to find a rescuer, Southern Air Transport (SAT) ceased operations at the end of September. The US cargo carrier, which had operated for more than 50 years, was largely hampered by its fleet of Lockheed L-100 Hercules, which left it as an oddball in today's freighter market and made the company an unattractive merger prospect.
Two eleventh-hour rescue plans came to nothing. Fine Air of Miami, Florida, looked at a merger with SAT as a way to expand its Latin American and Caribbean network - but the two could not agree what to do with SAT's nine L-100s. Then Texas-based Kitty Hawk Air Cargo stepped in with a possible buy-out plan, but is believed to have backed out after inspecting SAT's finances.
SAT's demise seems at first to sit strangely with the boom that most cargo operators are experiencing. But analysts say that privately held SAT never seemed successfully to implement a strategy after its move in 1995 from Miami to Columbus, Ohio. That was meant to begin a new direction for the company in which SAT would shed its old image an an ad hoc operator of Hercules freighters on disaster relief missions. The Columbus base was supposed to have become a transportation hub that provided more consistent and reliable revenues from scheduled cargo operations.
However, SAT could not get rid of the majority of its L-100s and had difficulty getting hold of the Boeing 747 freighters to replace them. At the same time, rivals Atlas Air and Polar Air Cargo were establishing niches in the freighter market.
Source: Airline Business
