In 1989, Aleksey Isaikin was working in Ulyanovsk overseeing manufacturing of the Antonov AN-124 while in the UK, Chris Leach was unemployed but had a wealth of cargo contacts.
Leach set up ACS in the basement of his house in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1990, and as the Soviet Union collapsed, Isaikin set up Volga-Dnepr Airlines working with his AN-124s.
Isaikin had the aircraft and crew, and Leach had the western contacts, so the two companies got together and have operated over 500 cargo charter flights together, mainly for the humanitarian sector.
The first flight was from Luanda, Angola to Entebbe, Uganda in the early 1990s and since then, they have worked together following several natural disasters.
Other highlights include flying boats to help the 2004 Asian Tsunami relief effort, flying a mobile hospital to the Caribbean following Hurricane Irma in 2017, and flying aid to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake where airport infrastructure was so badly damaged, only self-loading aircraft could land in Port-au-Prince.
Konstantin Vekshin, Chief Commercial Officer of Volga-Dnepr Group caught up with ACS’s Group Commercial Director, Justin Lancaster and Group Cargo Director, Dan Morgan-Evans to reminisce about their partnership. The video can be viewed here.