History
As the first private airline in the history of the country, Pamir Airways was issued an Air Operator's Certificate in 1994 by the authorities then in charge of civil aviation in the Islamic State of Afghanistan. Flight operations were launched in 1995 with an initial fleet of one Boeing 707-300 and two Antonov An-12 aircraft.
In April 2008, Pamir Airways was taken over by a group of Afghan businessmen under the leadership of Sherkhan Farnood, the president of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce & Industries and former chairman of Kabul Bank, who subsequently became chairman of the airline. Following the investment, Pamir Airways received a loan for $98 million from Kabul Bank, which was later exposed as one having indescribly poor lending standards (e.g. little to no interest required, no collateral required and repayment essentially optional) An effort was made to re-organize the Pamir assets, including its aging fleet of grounded planes, which could not be sold at high enough prices to reclaim the funds, though. As a consequence, the license of the airline was withdrawn, officially due to the poor safety record on 19 March 2011.
Read more about this topic: Pamir Airways
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)