Cheap Flights on Cathay Pacific. Book online Cathay Pacific fares.
Cathay Pacific Travel/Flight Information
Cheap Flights on Cathay Pacific. Book online Cathay Pacific fares.
Cathay Pacific Airways is a Hong Kong-based airline which operates offers flights to 106 destinations worldwide, including major international cities such as Bangkok, Berlin, Paris and Sydney.
With regular flights between London and Hong Kong, there is a range of classes and airfares to suit a wide range of passengers.
Although it is now a truly global carrier, Cathay Pacific started from humble beginnings.
It was founded by an American, Roy Farrell, and an Australian, Sydney de Kantzow, who had initially met in Shanghai before setting up the airline in Hong Kong - then a British colony - in September 1946.
Legend has it that the airline's unusual name was dreamed up by Farrell and a group of newspaper foreign correspondents over drinks in the Manila Hotel.
The airline's first aircraft was a Douglas DC3 nicknamed Betsy, which began operating flights around the region, including to Manila, Bangkok, Singapore and Shanghai.
Betsy was sold in 1955, but was rediscovered nearly 30 years later - still going strong - flying cargo around the Australian outback. She was bought again by the airline and housed in the Hong Kong Science Museum.
While Betsy was off adventuring around the region, the airline she had left behind grew rapidly.
The company which would become the Swire group had bought a 45 per cent stake in the company in 1948 and under the leadership of John Kidston Swire it became responsible for the airline's management.
Under his guidance the company grew rapidly, initiating flights to Japan in the 1960s.
Cathay Pacific took delivery of its first Boeing 747s in the 1970s, with the airline's first Jumbo Jets touching down in Hong Kong in 1979.
The decade that followed represented a boom for the airline industry in general and for Cathay Pacific in particular, as an Asian economic boom brought the world flocking to Hong Kong.
It was during the 1980s that the airline expanded its international network to include London, Brisbane, Frankfurt, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Rome, San Francisco, Paris, Zurich and Manchester.
After a successful rebranding exercise in the 1990s, the airline entered the new millennium with one of the youngest, quietest and safest fleets in the business and has continued to go from strength to strength ever since.
The rising success and popularity of Cathay Pacific was highlighted in October 2007 when the carrier received three major regional awards in the space of one week.
As one of the founding airlines in the One World Alliance - which includes British Airways - Cathay Pacific and its partners today offer passengers one of the largest networks of interconnecting flights on the planet.
The airline, with its subsidiary Dragonair, regularly carries more than one million passengers a month and continues to offer them the high standards of comfort and passenger service they have come to expect from the brand.
Today, it is nice to imagine that if Roy Farrell could see what the airline he christened in a bar had become, he would feel proud to have come up with the name Cathay Pacific.
If you want the very cheapest airfares that Cathay Pacific can offer, be sure to book through Major Travel.
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Cheap Flights on Cathay Pacific. Book online Cathay Pacific fares.
Last updated: 21st August 2008
