Gulf Air Transport (ICAO: GAT) was a small charter and cargo airline headquartered in New Iberia, Louisiana, United States, operating from 1979 until 1990.
Gulf Air Transport was founded in 1979, working in the support of oil exploration companies with a single Convair CV-440. In 1981, a Lockheed L-188 Electra was added and later on a Convair CV-580 Turboprops. Circa 1984, Boeing 727 100 and 200s were introduced to the company.
The company opened a crew bases in Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit. Philadelphia was the largest base. The airline flew several contracts to places such as Aruba, Port-au-Prince, British Guyana, Atlantic City, San Juan, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Nassau, Free Port, Aruba, Bonaire, Barbados, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta. Domestic destinations included Las Vegas, St. Louis, Orlando, and Atlantic City with others as single flight charters. Still other domestic cities were served by short term contracts or as first stops outbound including Baltimore, New York, Newark, and St. Louis.
One time charter flights were operated, particularly weekend sports charters, to many international destinations including Rock Sound International Airport, Curaçao, Granada, Puerto Plata, Bermuda, Port-au-Prince, London, and Warsaw. By the end of 1986, Gulf Air Transport had about 200 full time employees. In 1988, Gulf Air sent several 727-200s over to Malta for a six month "Sub-service contract" with Air Malta. The flight attendants and pursers were Air Malta employees, but the flight crews were Gulf Air Transport pilots.
In 1986, the company changed its name to just Gulf Air, but because of confusion with Bahrain-based Gulf Air, the airline was then forced to change its name to Trans Ocean Airways. Trans Ocean added two DC-8-71s and one DC-8-63 leased from United Airlines to their fleet and hired additional flight attendants to crew their new transatlantic service to Ireland, England, Milan, Helsinki and the Azores. The DC-8's were often grounded and had long, expensive maintenance delays that required deeper pockets than Trans Ocean had. Along with a recession in the US economy in the 1980s, Trans Ocean began to lose money and by 1989 it had to seek protection from its creditors by entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However the airline failed to make a profit and in March 1990 all operations were ceased and the airline ceased to exist.[1]