Last Wednesday (02 OCT 24), Martin Schröder, the Amsterdam-bornfounder and former CEO of Martinair, died at the age of 93. European and global civil aviation mourn one of its greatest representatives. The founding generation that took aviation to a new level in the 1960s and 1970s, has lost one of its leading minds and inspirers.
It was a time of inventors and visionaries: the Schröder generation included outstanding names such as Freddie Laker, who was one of the first airline owners to adopt the low cost/budget concept, or Joe Sutter, father of the Boeing 747 jumbo. The B747’s chapter ended on 30JAN23 in Seattle, with the delivery of the last jumbo ever built; a B747-8 freighter owned by Atlas Air and operated by Kühne+Nagel.
Freddie Laker, Joe Sutter, or Juan Terry Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways; their names are legendary, just as Martin Schröder’s is. In 1958, the Dutch national founded Martin’s Air Charter which later became Martinair.
