Sky Airline

Sky Airline, styled SKY, is a Chilean low-cost airline based at Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago. It flies within Chile and, through its Peruvian subsidiary, within Peru, with international routes to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay. As of October 2026 it remains independently owned, though a deal to bring it into Abra Group, the holding company of Avianca and Gol, has received regulatory approvals and was awaiting closing at last report.

History

Sky's roots go back to Flight Service – Servicios Aéreos, an air-taxi company founded in 1981 with small Piper aircraft at Valparaíso and later Santiago. In 1999 it came under the control of Jürgen Paulmann, a German-Chilean businessman, and Fernando Uauy, who had worked at National Airlines and Avant. Renamed Sky Airline, it began charters to Cuba in July 2001 with a Boeing 737-200, started domestic Chilean flights in December 2001 and reached northern Chile from Santiago in June 2002. It became a full IATA member in 2005. Sky announced in 2015 that it would become a low-cost airline, and Spanish-language Wikipedia dates the completion of that change to March 2017, together with a new brand and a fare system that lets passengers pay only for what they choose.

Its Peruvian subsidiary, Sky Airline Perú, began operating in 2019, and in 2022 Sky started flying to Miami from Lima. Holger Paulmann is the airline's president.

Fleet

Sky flew Boeing 737s from the start until 2013, replacing them with Airbus A319s and A320s from 2010. It took its first new Airbus A320neo in September 2018 and its first A321neo in June 2021, and ordered 10 A321XLRs in December 2019. A Wikipedia table dated March 2026 shows an all-A320neo-family fleet of A320neos and A321neos, shared between the Chilean and Peruvian operations. Maintenance is done by AIRMAN, a sister company at Santiago airport.

The Abra Group deal

• November 2025: Sky and Abra Group announced an agreement in principle to bring Sky into the group.
• June 2026: Chile's competition authority (FNE) approved the deal, as did Brazil's CADE; Peruvian approval was still pending.
• 22 August 2026: the companies said that, with the necessary approvals obtained, they would go ahead with a share exchange in which Sky's shareholders take a stake in Abra Group and the airline passes to a new company. They said Sky would keep operating independently. The exchange was to take effect at closing, which had not happened at that date.