In 1919, when Europe emerged from the First World War, travel moved to the forefront of people's minds. Backed by new technologies of the day, BA's forerunner, Aircraft Transport and Travel (AT&T), launched the first daily international scheduled air service. It offered a service from London to Paris and ushered in the modern era of air travel.
Within 5 years there were already some start-up airlines offering their services in Great Britain. In March 1924, the four best-known of these: Handley Page, Instone, AT&T and British Air Marine Navigation joined a larger airline called Imperial Airways and offered flights around the British Empire.
As Imperial Airways grew in size, it became the forerunner of a modern airline, offering flights to countries around the world, including Canada and Australia, and competed effectively with the airships that dominated the era.
In 1935 a rival arrived on the scene. British Airways Ltd was formed by a number of small private companies and quickly developed into a similar sized company. In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the British government nationalized the two airlines and created a new government-owned agency known as the British Overseas Airways Corporation or BOAC for short.
The final phase in these early decades of BA came in 1949, when BOAC was divided into two separate entities: British European Airways, which operated short-haul flights to Europe, and BOAC, which continued to serve the rest of the world. These two brothers served the world at the beginning of the jet era in the 1950s and became iconic leaders of British innovation.
In the 1970s, fuel costs and industrial concerns about the economy saw the government of the day decide that the two companies had become swollen and inefficient and in 1974, after a 4-year process, towing companies joined together. : British Airways, just in time for the birth of the supersonic era with Concorde in 1976.
