Arrow Air was a passenger and cargo airline based in Building 712 on the grounds of Miami International Airport (MIA) in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

[6] Arrow Air founder George E. Batchelor was born of Native American ancestry in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1920.

He became a pilot, and the loss of his first wife and son in a plane crash did not stop him from moving to Compton, California, in 1947 and establishing Arrow Air.

The airline halted scheduled operations in 1953 due to Batchelor's perception of an anti-competitive regulatory environment in the air transport business.

Considered a pioneer in both south Florida's aviation industry and in the Latin American air cargo market, Batchelor would amass a considerable fortune and donate much of it to homeless and children's causes before dying in July 2002.

San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the company was building a new hub, was the center of the scheduled network, and by the end of 1985 Arrow Air was flying between SJU and Aguadilla, Puerto Rico,[8] Montreal, Toronto, New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Orlando, and Miami.

In 1985, more than one million people flew onboard Arrow Air to 245 destinations in 72 countries with the majority of these flights being unscheduled charter service.

On December 12, 1985, one of the company's DC-8s crashed after takeoff in Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division and eight of Arrow's flight crew personnel.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded Arrow in March 1995, charging the carrier had improperly documented maintenance.

A company spokesman countered that the grounding was unfair and was related simply to the FAA's request that Arrow prints out a hard copy of its fleet records, which were stored electronically.

Houston was billing itself as a "Gateway to Latin America" to compete with Miami, which handled 85 percent of cargo traffic to the region.

The buy gave Arrow access to Fine's 133,000-square-foot (12,400 m2) refrigerated distribution facility for handling perishables, which made up the bulk of Latin American cargo.

Rising fuel costs, a downturn in the Latin American market, and debt left over from its Arrow Air acquisition combined to make the airline unflyable.

It emerged from Chapter 11 in May 2002 as a unit of Arrow Air Holdings Corp., a Greenwich, Connecticut, investment group led by Dort Cameron.

The new Arrow was losing $3 million a month, reported Traffic World in early 2002, yet the company aimed to break even by year-end.

The withdrawal of Grupo TACA's freighters from the market provided Arrow with an opportunity to expand services in Central America with some east–west routes.

[4] In March 2008, Arrow announced that it entered into a strategic alliance with the firm known as MatlinPatterson Global Opportunities, a private equity investment fund which formerly controlled the Brazilian company Varig Log along with the rebranded ATA Holdings (the parent company of ATA Airlines) which has now been renamed Global Aviation Holdings.

[13] According to the worldwide edition of the Official Airline Guide (OAG), in 1983 Arrow Air was operating scheduled passenger service with stretched Super DC-8 jets between the U.S. and Europe including nonstop flights between London Gatwick Airport (LGW) and both Denver (DEN) and Tampa (TPA) and also direct between Miami (MIA) and both London Gatwick Airport and Amsterdam (AMS) as well as direct between Tampa and Amsterdam.

[14] Also according to the OAG, the airline was flying Boeing 707 passenger service nonstop between New York JFK Airport and Georgetown, Guyana at this time.

The route map accompanying the above referenced Arrow Air timetable lists San Juan, Puerto Rico as a hub at this time with nonstop service to and from Baltimore, Miami, Montreal, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Toronto, and direct one-stop service to and from Boston.