ATA Airlines

Common card · No. 244381

ATA Airlines, Inc., formerly known as American Trans Air and commonly referred to as ATA, was an American low-cost and charter airline based in Indianapolis, Indiana. ATA operated scheduled passenger flights throughout the U.S. mainland and Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Portugal as well as military and commercial charter flights around the world. American Trans Air was founded by J. George Mikelsons in 1973 as a profit-making corporation providing the employees and aircraft for Ambassadair, a simultaneously established non-profit air travel club. Air travel clubs were a form of low-cost air transport that avoided regulation by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a now-defunct Federal agency that, at the time, provided tight economic regulation of almost all US air transport. Ambassadair partially backfilled for Voyager 1000, a large Indianapolis air travel club that operated from 1965 to 1973 and had been shut by the CAB for effectively being an airline; Mikelsons had been chief pilot. Ambassadair...

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