A Kingston upon Thames-founded aircraft charter specialist, with offices worldwide, that arranges private jet, group and cargo flights for clients and employs brokers and aviation professionals.
Air Charter Service, often called ACS, arranges chartered flights. It does not own or fly the aircraft itself. Instead its brokers find the right plane and crew for a client and manage the booking, the paperwork and the flight. The company's own website says it offers private charter (jets, helicopters, air ambulance), group charter (events, sports teams, emergency response) and cargo charter, which covers urgent and time-critical freight, dangerous goods, heavy and outsize loads, humanitarian relief and aircraft-on-ground parts. Its footer states that flights are operated by a separate carrier with control of the aircraft.
ACS was founded in 1990 by Chris Leach, the son of a pilot, who started it from the basement of his home in Kingston upon Thames after gaining experience at Saturn Airways. According to the company's history page, a Kingston University student who rented a spare room, Justin Bowman, did his placement year there and is now chief executive. The company's own values are exceptional, personal service, trust, long-lasting client relationships and peace of mind. It also says it keeps a 'small, family mentality' despite its worldwide size. These are the company's own claims.
ACS has remained based around Kingston upon Thames in south-west London. A July 2022 article reported that it opened a new office near Gatwick, to be led by Alex Sadler, its chief executive of the Gatwick office, as the company wanted to recruit from the aviation talent living near Gatwick rather than rely only on training new brokers in west London. The company says it has more than 40 offices worldwide, and its pages say it has over 500 staff, though the pages give different figures for the number of flights it arranges each year, so we have not quoted one. It is also the official charter supplier for Silverstone, with its Silverstone Shuttles service.
On culture, CEO Justin Bowman said in 2022 that ACS has an entrepreneurial culture that backs new ideas, including new products and new offices, and that its training programme has brought through hundreds of professionals over about 30 years. That is the company's own description. We did not find a staff account or an outside rating that we could check.
Charter broking is a sales-and-service career. People work as brokers, who take client requests and solve them by finding aircraft, operations and crew specialists who keep flights running around the clock, cargo teams who arrange emergency freight, account managers, and finance, IT and marketing staff. If you enjoy fast problem-solving, like aviation, and are good at keeping calm when plans change, this is a sector that rewards those traits.
Website: www.aircharterservice.com
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