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British Airways – Flight and Travel Information
British Airways (BA) is the UK's largest international scheduled airline operating flights to more than 550 destinations worldwide and priding itself on flying to the best located airports at the most convenient times.
With the main BA hubs located at London Gatwick and London Heathrow airports, passengers can catch flights from the UK direct to a range of exciting worldwide destinations, including Bermuda, New York, Mumbai, Sydney and Nairobi.
In fact, the airline offers more transatlantic flights than any other European carrier.
BA has a long history of offering the highest levels of service to its passengers.
Despite only being created in its current guise in 1974, the company traces its history back to the beginnings of commercial aviation in the UK.
The new company was granted a government subsidy of £1 million over ten years, provided it was used to develop air routes to the Empire.
Initially the airline began flying routes around Europe, but in 1925, dashing young pilot Alan Cobham flew from London to Cape Town on a route-scouting mission. Given the short range and primitive nature airplanes at the time, his route was a protracted one.
He flew London-Paris-Marseille-Pisa-Taranto-Athens-Sollum-Cairo-Luxor-Assuan-Wadi Halfa-Atbara-Khartoum-Malakal-Mongalla-Jinja-Kisumu-Tabora-Abercorn-Ndola-Broken Hill-Livingstone-Bulawayo-Pretoria-Johannesburg-Kimberley-Blomfontein-Cape Town on the way out. The round trip took nearly four months.
Four years later, the first routes to India were opened and Imperial Airways began serving the Empire in the high-class style that characterised the early years of commercial aviation.
Meanwhile, several smaller privately-owned companies had formed a conglomerate they called British Airways, but this was short lived, as the government decided to amalgamate it with Imperial Airways in 1939 and christen the new national carrier British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).
European flights were to be operated by British European Airways (BEA), a smaller nationalised carrier.
The two airlines grew rapidly, with BOAC achieving a world first by introducing the first commercial jet aircraft, the British-designed deHavilland Comet, in 1952.
In the early 1970s the decision was taken to merge the two airlines and BA as we know it was born in 1974.
The brand new airline created a stir when it became one of only two air transport companies to operate the long-anticipated Concorde. Created by a joint Anglo-French engineering project, the iconic dart-shaped plane is still the world's only supersonic aircraft to have regularly carried passengers.
When it bought the expensive Concorde, BA was still government-owned, but it didn't take long for Margaret Thatcher to take the decision to sell it off.
The airline was privatised towards the end of the 1980s. More than 20,000 jobs were lost during that decade.
However, the privatisation proved a great success, with demand for shares in the prestigious airline high. It was in the decade leading up this move that BA first declared itself "the world's favourite airline", a status it arguably retains to this day.
Today BA is one of the world's largest and most prestigious airlines. In 2007, it carried more that 33 million passengers to destinations all over the world using its fleet of 231 modern aircraft.
BA is also a member of the Oneworld Alliance, along with prestigious airlines such as American Airlines and Cathay Pacific. The alliance, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, allows it to provide passengers with even more great flights and airfares to more than 600 destinations.
The airline also has a range of alliances and codeshare agreements with various partner airlines, providing an extensive worldwide route network for flights and a range of customer benefits.
BA Executive Club members can even collect and spend airmiles when taking flights run by alliance and partner airlines, making that airfare go that little bit further.
Although Concorde was taken out of service in 2003, BA continues to grow and develop technologically as well. The airline and its aircraft today would have been unrecognisable to Alan Cobham and its other early pioneers.
BA predicted that its routes to Cape Town and other parts of South Africa would be very popular this year in light of the World Cup 2010.
