Pat Byrne, Chairman, Cityjet

Pat Byrne spent the first 20 years of his career in Financial Services, where he developed the business into the largest affinity group financial services provider in Ireland. He sold his stake in the company and went on to found CityJet in 1993, He established the airline to pioneer service from Dublin to the new airport in London City. CityJet was sold to Air France in 2000, with Pat leaving his role of CEO at the airline but remaining on the Board as a non-executive director. In April 2014, Air France sold Cityet to Intro Aviation of Nuremburg and Pat resigned from the Board. Very shortly afterwards, in February 2015, Pat returned to Cityjet, and he led a consortium to purchase the airline with the express ambition to become the leading provider of long- term wet lease capacity in Europe.

In the intervening 14 years between his two executive careers with Cityjet, Pat was involved with a leading Consulting firm who specialized in delivering dynamic breakthroughs for conventional businesses who needed to take a strategic leap. Pat then subsequently played a pivotal role in the re-positioning and re-branding of a stalled IT development company which specializes in delivering software to airlines to manage the complex domain of calculating crew pay and related analytics.

Since Pat took up the executive leadership role again at Cityjet in 2015, the airline grew from a fleet of 17 Avro RJ 85’s by 2018 to a total fleet of 44 aircraft across and additional two types, the Bombardier CRJ 900 and the Superjet SSJ 100. The airline had also transitioned from 40% wet lease and 60% own risk scheduled operations to 100% wet lease activity with 5 customer airlines.

The economic impact of the Covid crisis necessitated the placing of Cityjet into Examinership in April 2020 from which the airline emerged successfully in August of that year with a reduced fleet of 20 aircraft and a staff of 400 compared to the 1,200 pre-Covid.
With a far stronger balance sheet position and a capacity to grow its fleet again, Cityjet is now well placed to resume the pursuit of its stated ambition of turning the small regional airline into the leading niche operator in Europe in the provision of wet lease capacity to operate extensive regional route networks for major carriers.