Farnborough airport, UK-based Acropolis Aviation has appointed Mark Bird as ground operations manager. He joins from Air Tanker, the PFI initiative formed by Airbus, Babcock, Rolls-Royce, Thales and Cobham, operating 14 Airbus A330-200 Voyager aircraft. At Air Tanker, Bird was based out of Brize Norton as an operations duty manager for five years, managing the worldwide day-to-day operations of civil and military aircraft, co-ordinating multi-role operations, liaising with commercial airlines, representatives of the UK government and the Royal Flight.

“Mark is a welcome addition to our team with his multi-faceted operational experience gained in commercial airline, freight and airport operations,” says Acropolis CEO Jonathan Bousfield.

After three decades in the RAF, Bird was a member of the executive team behind the service launch of African regional carrier Fly Africa. He served as airport manager of Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, moving from DHL, where as operations manager he was responsible for the Middle East region.

“Acropolis Aviation is an established, highly regarded luxury charter operator and joining its team is a great privilege,” he says. “It is a very exciting time in Acropolis' history as we prepare for the arrival of G-KELT in the coming months.” The industry's first ACJ320neo is currently undergoing cabin outfitting to Acropolis' unique Alberto Pinto design at AMAC Aerospace's Basel, Switzerland, facility.

An early priority for Bird is to oversee the introduction of next-generation flight planning solution myairops, which comes online in November. “We're pleased to appoint myairops as our new flight operations software providers. myairops Flight was selected owing to its highly protective security of data, GDPR compliance, ease of data migration and HMI design,” he continues. “We're looking forward to a long-term collaboration.”