With its founder retiring at year end, Southern Air Holdings Inc. hired a former DHL Express executive as its new CEO.
Daniel McHugh succeeds founder James Neff at the Norwalk-based company, which charters cargo aircraft to government agencies and corporations from its main operations hub at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska. Southern Air is owned by New York City-based Oak Hill Capital Partners.
Neff will remain a board member and stakeholder of Southern Air, which he founded in 1999 as a successor company to Southern Air Transport, which had gone bankrupt. Southern Air Transport was best known for flying missions for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War and afterward.
“I am very proud of what the team at Southern Air has accomplished,” Neff said, in a prepared statement. “We have built a world-class company by continuously providing exceptional cargo transport services to our clients at the lowest cost. We have done this while remaining committed to the highest safety standards.”
McHugh previously led DHL Express Asia Pacific, which has more than 33,000 employees and $4.5 billion in annual revenue. Before that, he was an investor with New York City-based Vietnam Partners L.L.C., which invests in the logistics sector. He is a graduate of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, and holds an MBA from Duke University in Durham, N.C.
First Aviation Services Inc. sold a 37 percent stake to TAT Technologies Ltd. of Israel, with TAT transferring its Tulsa, Okla.-based Limco-Piedmont propeller repair business to Westport-based First Aviation.
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The deal was valued at $5.8 million.
In a separate transaction, First Aviation acquired the Wichita, Kan.-based propeller system repair business of Kelly Aerospace Inc., which is based in Montgomery, Ala. TAT said it was guaranteeing $7 million in debt First Aviation is taking on to complete the deal.?First Aviation owns the Memphis, Tenn.-based aviation products company Aerospace Products International Inc. In the fiscal year ending July 31, First Aviation lost $2 million on $106 million in revenue.
The two propeller overhaul companies First Aviation takes over had a combined $1.4 million profit in the fiscal year ending June 30, while generating $19.5 million in revenue.
