Paulo Mirpuri, Founder of Air Luxor and Hi Fly, Has Died — A Lisbon Aviation Pioneer Who Built Portugal's Largest Charter Operator and the Conservation Foundation Behind It

Paulo Mirpuri, the Lisbon entrepreneur who founded Air Luxor in 1988 and Hi Fly in 2005, died on Saturday 2 May 2026, the news broken first by Jornal Económico and confirmed across Portuguese media on Sunday evening. The obituary closes a 38-year run in which a former medical-school graduate from a Lisbon hospital internship turned a single street-billboard advertising campaign for Madeira and Paris flights into a charter and ACMI operation that has put Portuguese-registered widebodies on every continent — including the world's first commercial Airbus A340 landing on Antarctic ice in November 2021 and the only A380 ever operated by a charter airline. Hi Fly remains headquartered in Lisbon's city centre with Beja Airport as its operating base, and Mirpuri also leaves behind the Mirpuri Foundation, the conservation and performing-arts vehicle that made him one of the most visible Portuguese names in international ocean campaigning.

Who Paulo Mirpuri was

Mirpuri was the sixth of seven siblings, the son of a Pakistani businessman and a Portuguese mother from Luanda. He took his degree in Medicine at the Faculdade de Ciências Médicas de Lisboa and completed his internship at Hospital de São José, but practised the profession only briefly before pivoting into aviation. He was a regional vice-champion in Greco-Roman wrestling — a piece of personal history Portuguese media routinely revisited as a counter-image to the white-shirt boardroom profile he later cultivated. Beyond aviation, he led the Mirpuri Group, a holding active in agriculture, forestry, real estate and sustainability that the family controls outside the airline footprint.

Air Luxor: 1988 to 2006

Air Luxor launched in 1988 as a regular-route operator between Lisbon, Madeira and Paris, marketed to Lisboetas through the kind of large outdoor advertising campaign that was unusual in late-1980s Portuguese aviation. The route map expanded to 24 scheduled destinations, and the private-jet arm at its peak served 42 cities. The high-water mark was 2002: more than one million passengers carried and €100 million in revenue — meaningful numbers in a Portuguese market where TAP held the dominant flag-carrier position and the second-tier scheduled segment was thin.

The decline began the year before, in 2001, when the Portuguese state ruled Air Luxor out of the public-service tender for the Açores route — at the time the most reliable subsidised contract in the domestic market. Financial pressure built through the early 2000s, and the airline ceased operations in 2006. By that point Mirpuri had already pivoted: a year earlier, in 2005, he had founded Hi Fly as a charter-only operator, and the Air Luxor wind-down fed straight into the new vehicle's launch.

Hi Fly: charter, ACMI and the A380 bet

Hi Fly was incorporated in October 2005 and received its Air Operator Certificate in April 2006. The model was charter and ACMI — Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, Insurance — a wet-lease format that supplies airlines with widebody capacity on short notice when their own fleets are grounded for technical, scheduling or political reasons. The corporate office sits in central Lisbon, with crew training and corporate operations co-located, while Beja Airport in the Alentejo serves as the parking and maintenance base — a deliberate use of an underutilised state-built airport that has otherwise struggled to find commercial purpose since opening in 2011.

Hi Fly has flown Airbus A310s, A320s, A330s, A340s and most visibly an A380, which it took on lease in mid-2018 from a Singapore Airlines retirement and operated until end of 2020 — the only charter operator to do so anywhere in the world. The fleet now centres on a single A330-200 configured for 268 passengers, the smaller fleet reflecting both the post-pandemic reset of widebody charter demand and the structural shrinkage of the global ACMI market for very-large-aircraft. Client side, the airline has serviced British Airways, Turkish Airlines, sports teams and government charters, and is the operator behind the November 2021 first landing of an A340 on the blue-ice runway at the Wolf's Fang glacier in Antarctica — a record run for Portuguese aviation that was used in tourism marketing for years afterwards.

Hi Fly also positioned itself early on environmental optics: it ran 16 experimental plastic-free flights, eliminating 1,500 kg of single-use plastic from cabin service, and continued to badge sustainability as a brand attribute long after that became conventional in the industry.

The Mirpuri Foundation

Outside the airlines, Mirpuri built the Mirpuri Foundation as the family's philanthropic vehicle. The foundation operates across six programme areas — Marine Conservation, Wildlife Conservation, Performing Arts, Social Responsibility, Medical Research and Aerospace Research — and its highest-visibility presence is in international ocean and sailing campaigning, including institutional partnership with the Youth Sailing World Championships and a long-standing involvement with the international ocean-racing circuit. The marine-conservation arm leans on the messaging that half the planet's oxygen comes from the ocean, and the foundation has used Hi Fly's livery as a moving billboard for the cause for over a decade.

What this means for foreign residents

• Hi Fly continuity: The airline already runs day-to-day with a CEO — Antonios Efthymiou — and Mirpuri's role at the time of death was Chairman. There is no operational disruption signalled in the immediate term, and the certificate, the Lisbon office, the Beja base and the single A330-200 in service all remain in place. Watch for an interim-chair announcement and any board-level communication from the Mirpuri Group on long-term ownership and succession in the holding.
• Beja Airport: Mirpuri's parking-and-maintenance use of Beja kept the Alentejo airport on the commercial-aviation map at a time when scheduled services there have been minimal. Any change in Hi Fly's footprint would be material for the regional aviation conversation that already includes the Lisbon-airport overflow debate, the Alcochete decision and the cargo-and-MRO ambitions for the Beja site under successive governments.
• The Portuguese ACMI niche: Hi Fly is one of a small number of Portuguese-flagged operators that other airlines call when they need widebody capacity at short notice. With TAP heading into its largest fleet expansion ever in 2026 and the EU restructuring plan closing, the broader Portuguese aviation footprint is in motion; Hi Fly's role inside that footprint will be one of the second-order questions the next year of industry coverage has to answer.
• Practical residency note: Hi Fly does not sell tickets to the public — it leases capacity to other carriers and runs charter operations — so Portuguese residents flying to or from Lisbon under TAP, easyJet, Ryanair or Lufthansa codes may have been on a Hi Fly aircraft and a Hi Fly crew without ever seeing the brand on a boarding pass. The death of the founder does not change anything about the booking interface.

Funeral details and the formal succession announcement at Hi Fly and the Mirpuri Group had not been published as of Sunday night. Coverage on Monday 4 May is expected in Jornal de Negócios, Observador, ECO and the Portuguese aviation trade press, and an institutional response from the Beja municipality and the Lisbon-Brussels aviation-policy track is plausible given the Mirpuri Foundation's profile in the European Maritime Day calendar.