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AIR CHARTER SERVICE| PROFILE<br />
ACS fi rst offi ce<br />
Aircraft charter specialist Air<br />
Charter Service celebrate<br />
their 25th anniversary this<br />
year. ACS Chairman Chris<br />
Leach and his wife Tina<br />
founded the company in the<br />
basement of their family home in South West<br />
London back in 1990. To provide a context, IBM<br />
had launched the IBM PC seven years earlier and<br />
Microsoft had just recently passed the $1.1 billion<br />
revenue mark. The Dassault Falcon 2000<br />
would not see its fi rst fl ight till March 1993 and<br />
Bombardier wouldn’t start work on studies for<br />
the Global Express till 1991.<br />
Life works in strange ways sometimes. Business<br />
was tough in the early days and Chris and<br />
Tina Leach rented a room in their house to a<br />
student who turned out to be a manic plane<br />
spotter, who’d spend hours memorising the serial<br />
numbers of business aviation aircraft. That<br />
student was Justin Bowman, the current Group<br />
CEO of ACS.<br />
From those small beginnings, ACS has<br />
grown to the point where it now has 20 offi ces<br />
around the world and is opening more all the<br />
time. Chris Leach makes it clear that his ambition<br />
now is to see ACS grow to the point where<br />
within the next fi ve to ten years it can truthfully<br />
claim to be the world’s largest charter brokerage<br />
house across all three sectors.<br />
Autumn 2015 | International 55
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