Phuket Air

In my irregular series of aviation blogs I though I might inject a little humor here. As many of you know, there is a resort city in Thailand called Phuket. Its a wonderful resort which suffered at the ravages of the 2005 Tsunami in which 230 people were killed on the island of Phuket. Anyway, in 1999 Vikrom Aisiri, a Thai multimillionaire and his wife got together to form an Airline which they named Phuket Air. They started by leasing a few 737's and I started to notice after they got a few 747's from KLM. To see the word Phuket painted in huge letters on the side of a plane was sure to bring laughter to all of use in the air Cargo business and pretty soon the work was about in our office that if we just didn't want a piece of cargo to go anywhere we could just ship it on Phuket Air, using an exaggerated American pronunciation of the phonetics of the word. OK, Just day Fuckit Air and you get the drift.

Phuket Air eventually overexpanded and with the result was banned from flights to Europe due to safety and maintenance concerns. That airline stopped flying revenue passengers in 2005 and now serves as a wet-lease company flying overflow passengers for other airlines in the region and supplying air service to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj.