During my time at German Pacific, I led the launch of an all-cargo airline in Vietnam from the ground up — team, strategic plan, aircraft sourcing, financing, commercial network. Here's what the startup playbooks don't prepare you for.
During my time as Partner at German Pacific, one of the engagements I led from the earliest stages was the launch of an all-cargo airline in Vietnam. Not the advisory version of that — the actual version: building the core team from scratch, devising the overall strategic plan, managing aircraft sourcing and the conversion of a 737-800, selecting routes, identifying target customers, designing service offerings, and working with banks, funds, and investors to finance the aircraft acquisition.
Airline startups have a specific kind of difficulty that is qualitatively different from other startup environments. The regulatory surface is vast. The capital requirements are large and lumpy. The lead times between decisions and outcomes are long. And the thing you are actually building — an operating airline with regulatory certification, an AOC, commercial contracts, and trained staff — cannot be tested incrementally the way a software product can.
Three things stood out as distinctly underestimated in the typical startup analysis.
First: the regulatory environment in Vietnam requires relationship capital that takes years to build and cannot be compressed by any amount of money or urgency. Navigating the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam, understanding how decisions are actually made versus how they appear to be made, knowing which stakeholders matter at which stage — this is knowledge that lives in people, not in documents. The single most valuable early hire was someone who had spent fifteen years inside the Vietnamese aviation regulatory system.
Second: aircraft sourcing in the current market is a negotiation that rewards patience and penalizes urgency. Every counterparty can tell when a buyer is operating on a deadline. The financing structure for a 737-800 conversion involves multiple parties — lessors, banks, conversion shops, insurance providers — whose timelines and incentives are all different. Keeping those threads coordinated without signaling urgency is a management skill that does not appear on any aircraft procurement checklist.
Third: the commercial team design is the most consequential early decision and the one that receives the least structured attention. Who you hire to lead commercial — their network, their existing customer relationships, their credibility in the specific cargo community you are entering — determines your revenue ramp more than any other variable. A great aircraft with a weak commercial team is an expensive liability.
The Vietnam airline was built and launched. The lessons from doing it the hard way are transferable to any capital-intensive startup in a regulated industry — and to any organization trying to build in markets where institutional knowledge is more valuable than analytical capability.
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