British Airways

Commercial aviation in Britain began almost as soon as civil flying was permitted again in 1919. Aircraft Transport and Travel opened a daily London to Paris service that August, and within a few years several small companies: Handley Page Transport, the Instone Air Line, Daimler Airway and the British Marine Air Navigation Company: were competing on the short Channel routes against subsidised French rivals. None of them could make money, and a government committee concluded that Britain needed one strong carrier instead of several weak ones.

Imperial Airways was the result. Formed on 31 March 1924 from the four surviving companies, with a government subsidy and a brief to develop air routes across the Empire, it became Britain's chosen instrument abroad. Through the late 1920s and the 1930s it built the long trunk routes that defined its era: to Cairo, Karachi and India, down Africa to Cape Town, and eventually to Australia in partnership with Qantas. The aircraft were built for comfort and reliability rather than speed, most famously the stately Handley Page H.P.42 biplanes and, from 1937, the Short Empire flying boats.

Imperial neglected Europe, and in 1935 several independent companies (among them Hillman's Airways, Spartan Air Lines and United Airways) merged into a private rival that took the name British Airways Ltd. It flew modern monoplanes from Heston and then Croydon and Gatwick on European routes, and competed openly with the older airline for government favour.

By the end of the decade Parliament had judged both companies inadequate for what lay ahead. The Cadman Committee of 1938 criticised Imperial's management and equipment, and the government's answer was to nationalise and combine them. The British Overseas Airways Act of 1939 created a single public corporation to take over both, and it began operating on 1 April 1940, with the country already at war.

The British Overseas Airways Corporation spent the war as an arm of the state, flying diplomats, ferry pilots, mail and priority cargo on routes that survived the fighting, from neutral Lisbon, across the Atlantic, and on the so-called Horseshoe Route linking Durban, Cairo, Karachi and Sydney. When peace came, the Labour government reorganised civil aviation into public corporations. BOAC kept the long-haul world, British European Airways was formed on 1 August 1946 to fly European and domestic routes, and a third corporation for South America was folded back into BOAC in 1949.

Both corporations moved to the new London Airport at Heathrow, which opened to civil traffic in 1946 and would remain the family's home. BEA began with war-surplus Douglas Dakotas and grew into the largest airline in Europe, becoming in 1953 the first to operate a turboprop airliner in scheduled service, the Vickers Viscount. BOAC, short of suitable British types, flew American Constellations and Stratocruisers across the Atlantic while waiting for the home industry to catch up.

It looked, briefly, as if it had. On 2 May 1952 BOAC flew the world's first scheduled jet airliner service, a de Havilland Comet 1 from London to Johannesburg. Two fatal Comet breakups in 1954, off Elba and Naples, grounded the fleet and led to the discovery of metal fatigue around the fuselage openings; by the time the redesigned Comet 4 opened BOAC's transatlantic jet service in October 1958, Boeing's 707 was days away.

The arrangement of two state airlines, one looking outward and one to Europe, lasted nearly three decades. It produced loyal followings and distinctive cultures, and also persistent losses, duplicated overheads and a long argument over whether British corporations should be obliged to buy British aircraft.

Alliances replaced ownership as the way to reach the world. After an attempted partnership with American Airlines was blocked by regulators in the late 1990s, British Airways joined American, Canadian Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Qantas in announcing oneworld in September 1998; the alliance began operating on 1 February 1999, with British Airways among its founding members. A transatlantic joint business with American Airlines and Iberia finally received antitrust approval in 2010, and Finnair later joined it.

Consolidation in Europe followed. British Airways and Iberia, partners since the 1990s, agreed to merge in 2009 and completed the transaction in January 2011, creating International Airlines Group, a holding company registered in Madrid with headquarters functions in London. Each airline kept its own brand, licence and nationality. IAG added bmi British Midland in 2012, bringing its Heathrow slots to British Airways, then Vueling in 2013 and Aer Lingus in 2015.

The COVID-19 pandemic halted almost all flying in 2020. British Airways retired its remaining Boeing 747-400s that year, earlier than planned, ending the airline's 747 operation after nearly five decades, and gave up its short-haul base at Gatwick before returning there through a new subsidiary, BA Euroflyer, in 2022.

By 2025 the business had recovered. IAG's annual report records a record operating profit for British Airways of £2.23 billion at a margin of 15.2 per cent, capacity 1.7 per cent above 2024, and deliveries that year of one Boeing 787-10 and twelve short-haul Airbus aircraft. Some long-haul flying was subcontracted to American Airlines because of shortages of Rolls-Royce engines for the 787 fleet.

The 1960s gave each corporation a British jet designed around its own demands, and both proved narrower than the market. BOAC's Vickers VC10, in service from April 1964, was built to lift heavy loads out of hot, high and short African and Asian runways; passengers loved its quiet cabin and rear-mounted engines, but it cost more to fly than the Boeing 707 it competed against. BEA's Hawker Siddeley Trident, introduced the same year, was sized so tightly to the airline's specification that few other carriers bought it. On 18 June 1972 a BEA Trident, flight 548, stalled shortly after take-off from Heathrow and crashed near Staines, killing all 118 people on board, the worst air accident in Britain at the time.

The wide-body era arrived on American terms. BOAC opened Boeing 747 service between London and New York in April 1971, and the type would carry the airline's name for almost half a century. Meanwhile the case for two separate state airlines was weakening. The Edwards Committee, reporting in 1969, recommended a single holding board for the public sector, and the Civil Aviation Act 1971 created the British Airways Board, which took control of BOAC and BEA on 1 April 1972.

For two years the corporations kept their names while the board merged their operations beneath them, and aircraft began to appear in a shared livery lettered simply British Airways. On 31 March 1974 BOAC and BEA were dissolved, and British Airways became a single airline, absorbing with them the regional divisions that had grown up inside BEA in Scotland, the Channel Islands and the north of England.

The merged company inherited two workforces, two engineering bases, two sets of management and the losses of both. Industrial disputes, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and the arrival of cut-price transatlantic competition from Laker Airways left it, at the start of the 1980s, overstaffed and deep in debt: a national institution with little prospect, as it stood, of surviving without the Treasury.

British Airways and Air France were the only airlines to fly Concorde in regular service for its whole commercial life. The British carrier took seven aircraft, registered G-BOAA to G-BOAG, and on 21 January 1976 opened supersonic passenger service with a flight from Heathrow to Bahrain, timed to depart at the same moment as Air France's first service from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. Washington followed in May 1976, and New York, after a long fight over noise and landing rights, in November 1977.

The route network never became what the programme had promised. A service to Singapore, flown in partnership with Singapore Airlines, ran intermittently and was dropped in 1980; the Bahrain route ended the same year. What remained was the one market Concorde suited perfectly: London to New York in about three and a half hours, flown as BA001 and BA002, together with seasonal services to Barbados and a busy charter programme. Under private ownership, and with the aircraft on its own books, British Airways ran Concorde as a premium product that could make money, selling it to bankers, celebrities and anyone with a reason to cross the Atlantic before lunch.

The end came quickly. After an Air France Concorde crashed at Gonesse on 25 July 2000, the type's certificate of airworthiness was suspended and the British fleet was grounded. Modifications, including Kevlar liners for the fuel tanks and new tyres, returned it to service in November 2001, into an industry shaken by the attacks of 11 September. In April 2003 the two airlines announced Concorde's retirement, citing falling demand and rising maintenance costs.

On 24 October 2003 British Airways flew its last commercial Concorde service, BA002 from New York, landing at Heathrow in sequence with two other Concordes flying in from Edinburgh and a loop over the Bay of Biscay. On 26 November G-BOAF made the type's final flight, to Filton near Bristol, where it had been built. The seven aircraft are preserved in Britain, the United States and Barbados.

The Conservative government that took office in 1979 intended to sell British Airways, and in 1981 it appointed the industrialist John King, later Lord King, as chairman to make that possible. King cut the workforce by tens of thousands, closed routes and wrote off obsolete aircraft; from 1983 his chief executive, Colin Marshall, turned the company's attention to its customers, retraining staff and rebuilding the product around the business traveller. In 1983 the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi gave the airline a slogan it would use for two decades: the world's favourite airline.

British Airways was privatised by a public share offer in February 1987, one of the flagship sales of the Thatcher years. Within months it had agreed to take over its main British rival, British Caledonian, whose network at Gatwick it absorbed in 1988. The enlarged airline was consistently profitable through the late 1980s and the 1990s, and for much of that time the slogan was a claim it could support: it carried more international passengers than any other airline in the world.

The period had its reckonings. In January 1993 British Airways settled a libel action brought by Richard Branson and Virgin Atlantic over what became known as the dirty tricks campaign, apologising in the High Court and paying damages and costs; Lord King retired as chairman the following month. Under Robert Ayling, chief executive from 1996, the airline pursued alliances and a new corporate image, and faced a costly cabin-crew strike in 1997.

At the turn of the century, with the 747-400 at the heart of its long-haul fleet and a new head office at Waterside beside Heathrow, British Airways was at its largest. It then met, in quick succession, the grounding of Concorde, the collapse in transatlantic travel after September 2001 and the rise of low-cost carriers on its short-haul routes, and began a long period of retrenchment under Rod Eddington and Willie Walsh.

British Airways is unusual among the great flag carriers in how much of aviation history it can claim through its ancestors: some of the first international airline services, the Empire routes, the first scheduled jet service, the first turboprop service, and a share of the only supersonic airliner ever to carry passengers for a living.

It is equally a case study in what became of the state airline. It was among the first of Europe's national carriers to be sold to private shareholders, and its turnaround in the 1980s became a textbook example of management-led change. Its merger with Iberia produced one of the models for cross-border ownership within Europe's nationality rules.

Today it is a commercial company inside a Spanish-registered group, yet it still flies under the flag on its tails, answers to the radio name of Imperial Airways' bird, and keeps its Concordes and old liveries close to its identity.