Having left Radley in the summer of 1961, with the intention of going up to Cambridge to read archaeology and anthropology, with the vague idea of an academic career in one of those subjects, my aunt, Christina, who together with her husband, had been running Foyles, the family bookselling business in Charing Cross Road since 1945, invited me to join the firm to ensure its continuity with the next generation. I joined, working on the shop floor during the Christmas season of December 1961, followed by ten years in the book trade within the firm and a two and a half year spell learning the trade and languages in bookshops and publishing houses in Tübingen, Berlin, Helsinki and Paris. The various departmental jobs I took over were always stimulating, but real responsibility and a wage exceeding £1,600 a year had become increasingly elusive. A career change was made and I joined the West End firm of tax consultants Emson and Dudley during the days when income tax on personal investment income in excess of £20,000 a year was 98%.

However, I had started flying gliders at Dunstable while at Radley and with the RAF section of the CCF and I continued this into the 1960s and 1970s when I also obtained my powered flying licence.

As a result of my interest in aviation and flying, I had, for some years, harboured an ambition to start a modest commercial air taxi company. Commercial aviation attracts many who are in love with the product - the "Biggles" syndrome - and tablets should normally be taken for this affliction. In my case, I fondly imagined that if I kept the overheads low and the sales and marketing innovative, I would succeed where many others had failed. The attrition rate of airlines and air charter companies, which had disappeared without trace between 1978 and 1990, was 83%.

By 1978 I had amassed a small amount of capital sufficient to start Air Foyle, which gained its Air Operators Certificate in August 1978. With aircraft finance I purchased a second hand Piper Aztec, twin-engined, six seater aircraft and it was soon doing cargo, passenger and aerial survey charter work around the British Isles and nearer Europe.

For the first eighteen months no office accommodation was forthcoming at Luton airport where we were based, so I purchased a small, semi-detached house on an estate close to the airport where I, my first Chief Pilot and his wife (he was a Czech who had flown Liberator bombers for the RAF during the war) and their cat lived and worked. As the business grew, there were complaints from neighbours over the numbers of cars parked in the street and the strange comings and goings at all hours of the day and night by men in uniform. After eighteen months of discussions with Bernard Collins, an airport director of the old school, who always insisted on topping up each mid morning cup of coffee with a triple Black Label, we were allowed office accommodation at the airport.

By this time, we had secured a one year contract with British Gas to operate low level photographic inspection of North Sea Gas pipelines through the Midlands and the North of England, as an alternative to inspection by helicopters and we had become the first air charter company to be used by a courier company, Skypak, to operate flights between the UK and Europe overnight, instead of the material being carried by on-board couriers using daytime schedule passenger flights. Using our aircraft during the night, this courier company could, for the first time, and unlike its competitors, offer customers in the South East of England and in nearer Europe, an early evening cut off time collecting packages for guaranteed delivery the following morning.

The fleet and the turnover grew, in spite of the difficulties of the recession of the early 1980s. By the mid 1980s we had a fleet of six, twin-engined executive aircraft of various types, but profitability was always elusive.

However, having a presence in the market place as an aircraft charter operator, we increasingly received enquiries to charter larger aircraft that we did not ourselves operate. Rather than turn these enquiries down, we sourced such aircraft from other operators and airlines, becoming, in addition, an air charter broker.

The position of an aircraft charter broker is inevitably weak without an exclusive unique supplier and product or customer. In 1982 we were the UK sole agent for a German airline operating the Lockheed Hercules cargo aircraft, so we had gained some experience with outsize cargoes.

In 1986, always on the lookout for unique properties, we became aware of the new Soviet giant Antonov AN-124 cargo aircraft, designed for the military to carry tanks and missiles. Approaches to Aeroflot in both London and Moscow were rebuffed with a "nyet", but after years of patient negotiation, in 1989 Air Foyle became the exclusive sales agent in the Western world for the charter and lease of the fleet of AN-124 aircraft operated by the Antonov Design Bureau of Kiev.

AN-124 aircraft could accommodate up to one hundred and fifty tonnes of cargo and individual pieces of a weight and size that no commercially available Western aircraft could carry. Business in the first year was slow while the market became accustomed to this new capability and, in addition, we had conflicts of interest with Aeroflot under whose colours the Antonov Design Bureau were obliged to operate.

By 1990 the fleet had grown from two to four aircraft and Antonov were able to dispense with the services of Aeroflot by agreeing to lease the aircraft to Air Foyle under a UK Department of Transport permit, enabling the aircraft to operate as though under the British flag with British traffic rights worldwide, and this happened to coincide with the developing business being kick started into top gear by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Soon, we were flying a whole assortment of military supplies and stores for the Western Allies into the theatre of operations. At the outset of hostilities, several thousand Bangladeshis escaped from Kuwait to Jordan where they became stranded. With no passenger aircraft available, the United Nations contracted with us to operate ten flights, each carrying five hundred Bangladeshi refugees sitting on the floor of the cargo hold of the aircraft on plastic sheeting and mattresses, twenty-five chemical lavatories and an abundant supply of bread and water. Each return flight brought back one hundred tonnes of rice and five tonnes of tea for the remaining refugees still to be brought out. They were probably the most uncomplaining passengers that any airline has ever carried.

A whole variety of extraordinary cargoes have since been carried and a number of world records created and still held, such as the transport of a railway locomotive, which together with other material weighed one hundred and forty nine tonnes, from London, Ontario to Dublin. Other flights have included confidential operations for the military and other agencies of Western governments, fire fighting excavators and equipment to assist Red Adair in putting out the fires in Kuwait following the end of the Gulf War, most of the different yachts entering the Americas Cup yacht race, humanitarian relief flights for the United Nations, including the Indian, Jordanian and Bangladeshi military contingents to Sierra Leone, oil drilling equipment, bottling machinery, helicopters, ships engines, paper money, ostriches, supertanker bull gear wheels, mobile field hospitals, bulldozers, chemical reactor vessels, excavators, Pepsi Cola bottling plant equipment, giant cacti, Richard Branson's Round the World Hot Air Balloon and capsule, pigs, car parts for Ford and Volkswagen, gas turbine generators, transformers, whole aircraft, fresh fish, cigarettes, concert equipment for pop star tours, missile testing and tracking equipment, Ariane Five space vehicles, railway carriages and mining equipment.

Last year, we formed a new joint venture company with our erstwhile UK competitor of ten years, HeavyLift Cargo Airlines and this company, Air Foyle HeavyLift, having made a new five year agreement with Antonov, is now responsible for the management and operation of this fleet of aircraft from a new base at Stansted Airport.

This year, mainly due to Afghanistan, has been good to us having generated approximately US$ 60M of revenue during the first six months with about fourteen thousand tonnes of cargo on one hundred and eighty flights for the defence ministries of seven Western governments.

Antonov is about to bring back into service its single example of an even larger aircraft, its six-engined AN-225, originally designed and built to carry Buran, the Soviet space shuttle vehicle. This aircraft is twenty-five feet longer than the AN-124 and can carry up to two hundred and fifty tonnes and recently created a whole number of new world records carrying five main battle tanks to altitude on a route around Ukraine. We are launching this new product with its greater capacity into the world's air cargo market place.

In 1993 we decided to see if we could apply the principle of managing aircraft on behalf of others, to the operation of large passenger aircraft and the first contract was secured with the Leeds based tour operator, Sunseeker, for whom we operated a Boeing 737 on holiday charter flights to the Mediterranean. This was followed in subsequent years by the operation of a variety of passenger aircraft for various customers, including easyJet which, for the first two and a half years of their existence, were not an airline, but a tour operator owning aircraft and who contracted with Air Foyle Passenger Airlines to manage, operate and crew the aircraft on their behalf.

In 1992 I became a Trustee and Board Member of TIACA, the International Air Cargo Association and in December 1996 became its President and CEO for two years. This involved meetings in various part of the world and sometimes having to knock together the heads of various nationalities with different agendas. I was responsible also for conceiving, executing and chairing the largest international air cargo conference and exhibition, the International Air Cargo Forum in Dubai in 1996 and in Paris in 1998.

In 1998, with the American and British governments about to embark upon a new round of bi-lateral aviation liberalisation negotiations, the UK cargo airlines realised that although the Americans already held considerable traffic rights advantages in respect of cargo rights, by seeking to impose their template of so-called "Open Skies" on the British Government, this would both enshrine and also add to their existing advantages. Consequently, together with the three other principal British cargo airlines, we formed and I chaired the British Cargo Airline Alliance and we successfully worked with ministers and civil servants and at the negotiations to ensure that true reciprocal "Open Skies" should be achieved between the UK and the US in respect of air cargo and although no successful conclusion to these negotiations has been arrived at, the British Government maintain our position that in any further negotiations only "Truly Open Skies" should be allowed.

In June 1999, Christina Foyle, my aunt, who had run Foyles together with her late husband for nearly fifty-five years, died. Six days before she died she had made me the only other director and so on her death, I found myself presiding over a bookshop in a state of terminal decline, with reducing turnover, increasing losses, deteriorating cash position, no financial management and poor staff morale. I was unable to devote much time to the business during the last six months of 1999, but commencing in early 2000 and with the support of my cousin and brother, who had also become directors, we set about a wide-ranging long term programme of improvement and, at the same time, discovered that the company had been riven by a twenty year period of major frauds perpetrated on it by the senior management working in league with outside suppliers. We set about unravelling these frauds, together with private investigators, and the legal firm Mishcon de Reya and in May 2000 successfully obtained a series of bank account and asset freezing and investigation orders from the High Court against eleven defendants for the purpose of attempting to recover some of the stolen proceeds. Successful out of court settlements were eventually made with most of the defendants and this action drew a line under a fraud which had probably cost the company about £20M including interest.

A range of improvements, including computerisation of stock, improved treatment, training and motivation of staff, and a wholesale refurbishment of the physical premises has now been in train for over two years, during which time the decline in turnover has been reversed and turned into sales growth, with the aim for profitability by 2003. The objective is to make Foyles a pleasant, easy and informed bookshop to browse in or to buy books, while retaining the enormous range and depth of stock which you will not find in any of the bookshop chains elsewhere.

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