Building an All-Cargo Airline From Scratch in Vietnam
What the startup playbooks don’t prepare you for when the product is an operating airline.
- Launched an all-cargo airline in Vietnam from the ground up: team, strategy, aircraft, financing, commercial network.
- Regulatory relationship capital and patient aircraft sourcing mattered more than any amount of money or urgency.
- Commercial team design was the most consequential decision and the one that gets the least structured attention.
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 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 carry 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 Air Operator Certificate, commercial contracts, and trained staff — cannot be tested incrementally the way a software product can.
“A great aircraft with a weak commercial team is an expensive liability.”
Three things stood out as distinctly underestimated. First, the regulatory environment in Vietnam requires relationship capital that takes years to build and cannot be compressed by money or urgency — the single most valuable early hire was someone who had spent fifteen years inside the Vietnamese aviation regulatory system. Second, aircraft sourcing rewards patience and penalises urgency: the financing structure for a 737-800 conversion involves lessors, banks, conversion shops, and insurance providers, each with different timelines and incentives, and every counterparty can tell when a buyer is operating on a deadline. Third, commercial team design is the most consequential early decision and the one that receives the least structured attention — who leads commercial, their network, and their credibility in the specific cargo community determines the revenue ramp more than any other variable.
This is the same anticipatory-hiring discipline described in Foresight Over Reaction — building the capability before the data proves you need it.