Nolinor Aviation Launches Fleet Management Service to Operate Client-Owned Aircraft Under Its Certificate

Nolinor Aviation, based in Mirabel, Quebec, announced on Oct. 20, 2026 that it is launching a fleet management service for organizations that own an aircraft or are considering acquiring one. Nolinor will take responsibility for operating these aircraft, so clients do not need to obtain their own air operator certificate. Oliver Tomczak, appointed Vice President, Fleet Strategy, will lead the new business unit.

Crews, maintenance, flight dispatch, safety management and parts procurement will fall under Nolinor's air operator certificate, issued by Transport Canada under Subpart 705. Clients keep ownership of their aircraft, engines and technical assets, along with control over their schedules, service standards and onboard branding.

The service draws on infrastructure Nolinor already uses for its Northern Canada operations: three maintenance lines across two provinces, a certified Type A flight dispatch centre with redundancy in both provinces, a certified safety management system, a spare parts inventory and its own flight simulator for pilot training. When a client's aircraft is in heavy maintenance or otherwise out of service, the client will have access to the rest of Nolinor's fleet.

Each engagement starts with a no-obligation assessment in which Nolinor models the client's mission or analyzes its existing operations. A joint planning phase follows, before aircraft operations begin under performance metrics agreed by both parties.

"Owning an aircraft should not mean running an airline," Tomczak said, adding that clients deal with a single point of contact and have full visibility into costs. Marco Prud'Homme, President and Chief Executive Officer, said the service makes the company's expertise, built over more than 30 years, available to organizations that need their own aircraft, and that Tomczak will also help businesses select the aircraft best suited to their needs.

Nolinor was founded more than 30 years ago and provides charter, cargo, ACMI, fly-in/fly-out and crisis management services across Canada, the Americas and Europe. It operates one of the largest charter Boeing 737 fleets in North America, including the world's largest fleet of Boeing 737-200s, and specializes in northern operations on gravel, ice and paved runways.

The company describes its pitch to prospective clients as combining that operating background with help in choosing the aircraft, since Tomczak's role extends from selection through day-to-day operation.

Running an aircraft under someone else's operating certificate is a familiar arrangement in business aviation, where owners hand day-to-day operation to a certificate holder and keep title to the asset. Nolinor is applying that logic to a Subpart 705 carrier, a certificate category associated with larger aircraft, which widens the pool of owners who can avoid building their own flight department and certification workload.

The economics hinge on utilisation. A carrier that already carries the fixed cost of maintenance lines, a dispatch centre, a safety system and a simulator can spread those costs across client aircraft, while owners trade control of operations for predictability and a backup fleet during downtime. The fleet-substitution feature is the part that most separates this from a pure management contract, since it depends on the operator having spare capacity of its own.

The next milestone is the first signed engagements: which aircraft types clients bring, how the agreed performance metrics are written, and how the operator allocates its own fleet between client backup and its charter and cargo work.