Air Charter Service (ACS) had a record month in July as it booked 1,114 charter contracts, making it the company’s best ever monthly figure.

Chief executive officer, Justin Bowman says it is a “great achievement” with many of these consisting of multiple sectors and explains: “With our diversification into other markets, such as OBCs and aircraft sales, we actually arranged a total of 1,212 contracts in July. That is an average of one contract every 36 minutes.

“Full cargo charter numbers did appear to suffer a little in the UK, however European business was stable and we saw impressive growth in our Asian offices as well as Australia, which has got off to an excellent start, after opening earlier this year. Our OBC division has also enjoyed strong growth throughout the year and contributed to July’s record.”

Bowman says growth was mainly fuelled by private jet business though, which was up almost 20 per cent year-on-year and it saw particularly strong growth in Europe and North America.

He notes: “Despite the deterioration in general of the Russian market, the numbers across our three CIS offices were up on last year. The addition of our three latest offices, in Geneva, Miami and Sydney, has also increased numbers as they are starting to establish themselves as profitable operations.”

And Bowman is optimistic August will outshine July as in the same month last year ACS achieved a previous record.