Rich Corrado to Replace Joe Hete as CEO at Wilmington Air Transport Services
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Joe Hete will step down as chief executive of Wilmington’s Air Transport Services Group Inc. in May and will be replaced by Rich Corrado, the air transport company said Feb. 25.
Hete, 65, is expected to remain on ATSG’s board and to be elected chairman on his retirement. Randy Rademacher, current board chairman, is to become the board’s independent lead director, the company said.
Corrado, 60, became president of ATSG, an air leasing and transport company, in September.
Corrado
ABX Air was formed as a Wilmington-based subsidiary of Airborne Express Inc. in 1980, and served as the airline operations unit of the package-express company until ABX Air was spun off as a separate publicly traded airline company in connection with DHL’s acquisition of Airborne in August 2003.
Hete has served as president, CEO and a director of ATSG since 2003, and for 20 years before that in management at ABX Air, including serving as its president, the company said.
“Hete said that he will be leaving ATSG’s management team, businesses and shareholders in a strong position,” the company said in a release. “Over the 10 years ended last Dec. 31, ATSG’s common-share price increased more than four times as much as the benchmark Dow Industrials, S&P 500 and Russell 2000 indexes over the same period.”
Hete was heading ATSG in 2008 when air carrier DHL announced that it was closing what was then its Wilmington air cargo hub. The move affected some 8,000 area jobs.
Host Seth Clevenger went to CES 2020 in Las Vegas and met with Rich Mohr of Ryder Fleet Management Solutions and Stephan Olsen of the Paccar Innovation Center to discuss how high-tech the industry has become. Listen to a snippet above, and to hear the full episode, go to RoadSigns.TTNews.com.
ATSG remained in Clinton County and has secured a slowly growing business in the Wilmington Air Park. Today, the company serves not only DHL but Amazon. When Amazon confirmed the presence of its air cargo network in Wilmington in March 2016, it was leasing 20 Boeing 767 freighter jets from ATSG.
In November 2018, Amazon said it would open an “air gateway” and package-sorting facility at Wilmington Air Park.
The Wilmington air gateway retrofitted existing space at the Air Park, in buildings F and A. It was expected to take up 1.2 million square feet and about 35 acres. However, Amazon has said little publicly about how many jobs are anchored in the sorting center.
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