Birth of a Niche: How Small Freighters Can Create Big Cargo Opportunities

Bob Convey had just finished booking two more orders for Aeronautical Engineers Inc. (AEI)’s CRJ200 freighter conversion when Air Cargo World rang to talk about the aircraft conversion house’s come-from-behind success story. “We always launch these programs based on a combination of gut feeling and industry knowledge and research,” the senior vice president of sales and marketing explained. And when AEI launched the CRJ200 conversion program in 2013, the industry consensus was that the aircraft was dead in the water. “We got a lot of questions about the CRJ200 from people who thought it was an odd choice,” Convey recalled. “Others said that it would never work.”