Southern Air Transport

Southern Air Transport (SAT), based in Miami, Florida, was, in its final incarnation, a cargo airline. However, it started life as an irregular air carrier (later known as a supplemental air carrier), a type of carrier defined and tightly controlled until 1978 by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a now defunct Federal agency that, at the time, closely regulated almost all US commercial air transportation. From 1960 to 1973, the small carrier was secretly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which used it to support its activities primarily in Southeast Asia connected with the Vietnam war, though SAT continued to function in other regards as a normal charter airline. During this period, SAT was part of a complex of CIA-owned carriers, including Air America and Intermountain Aviation. Having no further use of the carrier, the CIA decided to sell it in the early 1970s, but its ownership leaked in what became a storm of controversy.

The carrier was also known for its role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s, during which SAT transported arms to Iran and to the US-backed anti-communist right-wing rebels in Central America known as the Contras, which were fighting the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

In the mid-1990s, SAT ranked as the 10th largest all-cargo airline in the world by ton-miles carried.

After SAT ceased operation in 1998, many of its assets were used to start another airline, the similarly-named Southern Air.