Talk:Capitol Air

USSR?

I used to have an old route map for Capitol from 1977 showing a route that went from Moscow to Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. What was Capitol doing operating service in the USSR in the mid-1970s? Did they actually have operating authority there or did they have code sharing with Aeroflot? -Rolypolyman (talk) 06:14, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Former employees of Capitol Air get together on Classmates.com, you may want to address this question to them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by CapitolAir (talk • contribs) 04:28, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

While it is true that Batchelor owned Capitol for a while, he did not put it in bankruptcy. Batchelor, I believe, bought his interest from the estate of Jesse Stallings, the founder of the airline. In about 1983, Batchelor sold his shares to a group from New York who were in the concrete business and who had ties to organized crime. They owned the airline for a very short time and decided they didn't want it, and they sold the shares to Farhad Azima (who also owned Global Air at the time) and Nelson Happy, a lawyer and banker from Kansas City. I believe that Azima had 51 percent and Happy had 49 percent. After a short while, Happy was forced to sell his shares because his bank was failing and he needed the money. He sold his shares to John Catsimatidis, owner of Red Apple Supermarkets in New York City. Azima and Catsimatidis operated the airline for a while, until it finally was forced into bankruptcy in late 84 or early 85.

In its last days, Capitol operated DC-8s, DC-10s and 727s. Some planes were leased from Batchelor's company, but it had also owned some planes outright. Shortly before terminating it operations, Capitol had leased a Boeing 727 and an Airbus A-300-B4 from Hapag-Lloyd. Following Capitol's demise, the Airbus (D-AHLZ) was leased to Air Jamaica and Condor before being transferred to Pakistan International Airlines (AP-BCP). Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268 was an Airbus A300, registration AP-BCP, which crashed on approach to Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport on 28 September 1992 with the loss of 167 souls, including 12 crew.Chaszur (talk) 00:03, 1 June 2015 (UTC) The DC8s kicked around the industry for a while. One of them eventually found its way to Burbank Aviation's hushkit project, but that's a different story.

In the 1990s, Catsimatidis resurrected Capitol under the name Capitol Air Express, which flew some 727s owned by Catsimatidis. It flew mainly charters between Canada and the Carribean. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cortes0505 (talk • contribs) 22:11, 26 May 2011 (UTC)