Ansair

Ansair was founded by Reg Ansett in 1945 at Tullamarine, to make bodies for his Ansett Pioneer coaches, as well as manufacture aircraft components for Ansett Airways.^[1] It also provided bus bodies for other operators.

In 1987, a plant opened in Kingston, Tasmania, to make bodies for Scania buses used by Metro Tasmania and, in January 1993, a plant opened at East-West Airlines' former Tamworth Airport maintenance facility to make bodies for Scanias used by Sydney Buses.^[2][3]

In August 1995, Ansett Transport Industries sold Ansair to the Clifford Corporation.^[4] In September 1995, the Kingston plant closed.

In 1996, more chassis options were explored by Ansair, experimenting with MAN and Mercedes Benz systems on Ansair low floor bus models, as part of the order requested by Sydney Buses. These variants were limited, and were manufactured at the Tullamarine plant. Tullamarine was the plant that took on the more-so unusual builds, leaving the other plants with the bulk ordered Scania and Volvo builds.

In 1997, the Tullamarine manufacturing plant was closed.^[5][6] Ansair ceased trading in November 1998 when the Clifford Corporation collapsed; leaving 140 undelivered, yet incomplete, government and private buses ordered by various bus companies.^[7] Austral Pacific was appointed to take over the operations of what was left of Ansair; and to get back on track and complete the remaining buses in manufacturing. Whilst this took place, the decision was made in December 1998 to close the Geebung plant. The only remaining plant still in operation after this was Tamworth, with the organization only constructing Volvo B10BLE Ansair Orana buses, under the Austral Pacific brand. In April 1999, Austral Pacific collapsed, once again halting operations and manufacturing at the company's only leftover base, Tamworth.

The Tamworth plant was reopened by Jakab Industries in June 1999 to complete a late, yet outstanding order of Volvo B10BLEs for Sydney Buses, under the Phoenix Bus brand.^[8][9][10] Once the order was completed for the state government, Jakab wound up the Tamworth plant's operations, and sold the site and returned its operations back into Queensland.