ABX Air Brand Guidelines: Midwest Air Charter, Airborne Express & the 767 Freighter

Cheques, a forwarder and an airport in Ohio.

ABX Air began as Midwest Air Charter (MAC), an Ohio company incorporated at the end of 1970, according to English Wikipedia. Based at Elyria and flying from Lorain County Airport, MAC carried cashed cheques for Ohio banks and, from 1972, for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. In 1978 it bought the airport at Wilmington, Ohio, and in January that year the Civil Aeronautics Board granted it an all-cargo certificate under the Air Cargo Deregulation Act of 1977.

Its main customer became Airborne Freight Corporation, a Seattle-based freight forwarder that began chartering MAC aircraft in October 1976 and bought 9.5 percent of it in December 1978, Wikipedia says. Airborne bought MAC outright in a deal that closed on 16 April 1980 and renamed the airline Airborne Express. ABX Air’s own timeline dates its founding to April 1980 “under the Airborne Express name” and says Airborne set up an air hub at Wilmington that year to fly packages overnight. Its first package sorting facility, opened in June 1981, was designed for 50,000 packages a night; a renovated one, opened in October 1990, could sort 520,000, the timeline says.

The new owner simplified MAC’s mixed fleet. By 1982 it flew NAMC YS-11s and Douglas DC-9s, and it added DC-8s in 1986, according to Wikipedia, which also describes the airline’s use from 1985 of so-called C-containers, sized to pass through passenger doors so that cargo doors did not have to be cut into the aircraft. In 1985 the parent adopted Airborne Express as its trade name; to avoid confusion, the airline itself was renamed ABX Air in early 1989, Wikipedia says. ABX Air’s timeline instead gives August 2003 as the date its current name was adopted, under a reorganisation. The company says Airborne grew to become the third-largest express freight company in the United States.

DHL, ATSG and Stonepeak.

The Boeing 767 arrived in the 1990s. Wikipedia records the purchase in January 1996 of 12 Boeing 767s for conversion to freighters, and ABX Air’s timeline says the type was selected in 1997 as its next-generation aircraft. In 2003 DHL bought Airborne, kept its ground business and spun off the airline, because as a foreign-owned company it could not own a US carrier, according to Wikipedia; ABX Air became a public company on 16 August 2003, listed on the NASDAQ National Market.

On 31 December 2007 ABX Air completed its purchase of Cargo Holdings International, the parent of Air Transport International and Capital Cargo International Airlines, and was reorganised under a holding company that took the name Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) on 16 May 2008, Wikipedia says. DHL announced in November 2008 that it would leave the US domestic market; in March 2010 ATSG signed new long-term agreements under which ABX Air kept flying the US portion of DHL’s international network. ABX Air’s timeline records later extensions of its DHL operating agreements, the most recent in 2022 running through April 2028, and the start of ACMI agreements with Amazon in 2015.

ATSG itself changed hands in 2025. Its sale to the investment firm Stonepeak was announced on 4 November 2024, approved by ATSG’s stockholders on 10 February 2025 and completed on 11 April 2025, after which its shares stopped trading on NASDAQ, ATSG said in a Business Wire release. STAT Times still described ABX Air as an ATSG subsidiary in September 2026.

ABX Air describes itself as a FAR Part 121 cargo airline offering ACMI and CMI contracts, cargo aircraft charters and line maintenance support, with customers in e-commerce, express delivery and the US government. Its fleet page lists 26 Boeing 767-300 and 7 Boeing 767-200 freighters in service. In September 2026 ATSG announced that ABX Air would operate a Boeing 767-300 freighter for Miami-based Global Aviation Link under a long-term ACMI agreement, STAT Times reported, with new routes to Caracas, Medellín and Quito named by Global Aviation Link.

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.

An airline that often flies in a customer’s colours.

Much of ABX Air’s flying is done in a customer’s colours: Wikipedia notes that DHL is its main customer and that many of its aircraft are painted in DHL’s yellow and red livery. Its own identifiers echo its past. Wikipedia gives its ICAO code as ABX and its radio call sign as “ABEX,” and its former names, Airborne Express and Midwest Air Charter, alongside the current one.

The company keeps the Airborne Express story in view. Its timeline says that in 2020, in conjunction with its 40-year anniversary celebrations, it unveiled a retro livery, and its about page says that “from our history as Airborne Express” it understands cargo. The website itself is plain and practical: a home page built around ACMI, CMI, charter and line-maintenance services, a fleet page with two aircraft counts, and a history page set out as a dated timeline running back to 1980.

For a design guide, ABX Air shows how an operator that often flies under another company’s livery can still keep a visible lineage of its own, through a short name, an anniversary scheme and a dated history. Compare it with DHL, its main customer, and with Kalitta Air, a Michigan freighter operator that also flies for DHL. For this guide we use a night-sort blue, ink and ramp grey with an amber accent, set with a technical sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ABX Air’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.