BA celebrates 90th anniversary

The company formally known as Air Transport & Travel now British Airways, made their inaugural voyage on the 25th August 1919. It took to the skies from Hounslow in West London and was the first company to offer a daily service to a foreign country.

The journey to Le Bourget, just outside Paris would take two and a half hours from runway to runway and cost the equivalent today of more than £1,500 per person.

Many years have passed since those days and the company we know today as British Airways was formed in the mid 1970s by the merger of British Overseas Airways and British European Airways taking the obvious choice of BA as their name.

Today the airline is in a constant battle with the emergence of low-cost airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet. As the economic crisis has taken hold many travellers have turned to budget carriers to take them to their destinations, which have hurt the likes of BA who recorded a loss of £401 million in the last financial year.

Despite the loss BA plan to be here in another 90 years time, but have had to make cuts in their workforce and operations. In recent times they have also announced that they would stop complimentary meals for people on short haul flights.

“Over the past nine decades, British Airways has played its part in many historic episodes. We provided the first air links to far-flung capitals in the days of empire, and flew Winston Churchill across the Atlantic during wartime,” said Martin Broughton, chairman of BA.