Cargolux Brand Guidelines: Luxembourg’s 1970 Freighter Airline & “You Name It, We Fly It”

An airline, a shipping group and an Icelandic carrier.

Cargolux was founded in Luxembourg in March 1970. In a release marking its 50th anniversary on 4 March 2020, the company said that exactly half a century earlier, Luxembourg’s national airline Luxair, the Icelandic airline Loftleiðir, the Swedish shipping company Salén and some private investors had set it up. English Wikipedia gives the same founders and names Einar Ólafsson as the first employee and first chief executive. Its formal name is Cargolux Airlines International S.A., and its home base and hub is Luxembourg Airport.

Flying began in May 1970 with one Canadair CL-44 freighter, on services from Luxembourg to Hong Kong, according to English Wikipedia. By 1973 the airline had five CL-44s and its first jet, a Douglas DC-8. In 1978 it ordered its first Boeing 747s, which arrived in 1979, and the CL-44s were retired. In 1983 it introduced CHAMP, short for Cargo Handling and Management Planning, a computer system; Wikipedia says Cargolux sold its remaining shares in CHAMP Cargosystems to SITA in 2022.

The 747 became the whole fleet. In 1993 three Boeing 747-400F freighters arrived in Luxembourg, and the company says it was the first airline to fly the type. By 1999 it had ten 747s. Cargolux was also the launch customer for the Boeing 747-8F: Boeing handed over its first one in Everett, Washington, on 12 October 2011, English Wikipedia says, after a short delay over contract issues between the two companies.

Shareholders from Luxembourg, Germany, Qatar and Henan.

Cargolux has always had airline and state-linked shareholders, and their mix has changed several times. English Wikipedia records that Lufthansa bought a 24.5 percent stake in 1987, when Luxair raised its own holding to just over 24.5 percent. In 1997 Luxair went to 34 percent and Lufthansa sold its stake to SAir Logistics, part of the Swissair group, which raised its share to 33 percent the following year.

On 8 September 2011 Qatar Airways bought a 35 percent share, becoming the second-largest shareholder after Luxair, Wikipedia says, with two Luxembourg institutions, the state savings bank BCEE and the investment company SNCI, holding most of the rest. Qatar Airways announced in November 2012 that it would sell after disagreements with the other shareholders. Its stake passed to the Government of Luxembourg, which sold it in 2014 to Henan Civil Aviation Development and Investment. As part of that agreement Cargolux began flying from Luxembourg to Zhengzhou, in Henan province, and in 2017 it took a 25 percent stake in a joint venture, Henan Cargo Airlines.

The company’s own page now lists five shareholders: Luxair with 35.10 percent, HNCA with 35.00 percent, BCEE with 10.90 percent, SNCI with 10.67 percent and the Luxembourg State with 8.32 percent. It also gives the scale of the business in its own words: more than 85 offices in over 55 countries, a network of more than 70 destinations that circles the globe five to six times a week, and a trucking network that carries freight on by road from Luxembourg. Products are sold under short names in a single family, such as CV jumbo for outsized loads, CV alive for animals, CV pharma and CV fresh, with the long-standing slogan “You name it, we fly it.”

How cargo airlines present themselves.

A cargo airline sells something its customers rarely see: space in the dark of a main deck. Its identity therefore lives on the outside of the aircraft. A freighter has few or no cabin windows, so the fuselage reads as one long, clean surface, and the tail becomes the main signature. Across the category, tails are painted in strong, simple fields of red, blue, orange or grey that can be recognised from an apron or a ramp camera at a distance, with the name in large capitals along the side.

The aircraft themselves are part of the message. Freighter operators name their types openly, and widebody freighters such as the Boeing 747-8F and 777F are presented as capability rather than decoration: the nose door of a 747, the main-deck side door, the number of pallet positions. Fleet lists, with types, counts and specification sheets, sit near the top of many cargo airline websites, often next to the next aircraft on order.

The network is shown as a map. A hub sits at the centre, and lines run out to gateways on several continents, sometimes with the road-feeder trucks that carry freight on from the airport drawn in as well. Schedules are published as downloadable timetables, because the reader is usually a freight forwarder planning a booking rather than a traveller.

The rest of the visual language comes from the cargo. Pages on special cargo, from live animals and fresh produce to pharmaceuticals, dangerous goods and outsized machinery, each get their own name and photograph. Charter pages show unusual loads, and partner pages name the logistics companies and shippers for which aircraft are flown. For a designer, the category is a study in practical identity: few elements, large scale, and a register built for operations staff, not for passengers.

Ten 777-8 Freighters on order.

The record also includes competition and compliance cases. On 9 November 2010 the European Commission fined eleven air cargo carriers, Cargolux among them, for a cartel over fuel and security surcharges. The EU General Court annulled that decision on procedural grounds in December 2015 without ruling on whether the cartel existed, and the Commission re-adopted the decision and the fines in March 2017, its press releases record.

The fleet is set to move beyond the 747. On 12 October 2022 Boeing and Cargolux finalised an order for ten Boeing 777-8 Freighters, with options for six more, at a signing in Luxembourg; the airline had named the aircraft at that year’s Farnborough show as the replacement for its 747-400Fs. Its current company profile describes a fleet of 30 Boeing 747-8 and 747-400 freighters, third-party 747 maintenance in a two-bay hangar in Luxembourg, and an aerial firefighting unit, Aquarius Aerial Firefighting. Its network page adds the Luxcargo Handling Cargo Center at Luxembourg Airport, where freight is handled on the ground, and a road feeder network of trucks across Europe. English Wikipedia’s fleet table for August 2025 lists fourteen 747-8Fs, six 747-400Fs and six 747-400ERFs. Cargolux said in April 2026 that it ended 2025 in tenth place in IATA’s ranking of the top 20 cargo carriers by international scheduled freight tonne kilometres.

For a design guide, Cargolux shows how a small country’s airline can build a global identity on one aircraft type, a single product family and a slogan that has lasted. Compare Lufthansa, a shareholder from 1987 to 1997, and Qatar Airways, a shareholder from 2011. For this guide we use a deep red, greys and a charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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