British Eagle
British Eagle International Airlines was a major British independent airline that operated from 1948 until it went into liquidation in 1968. It operated scheduled and charter services on a domestic, international and transatlantic basis over the years.
History
Formation and early operations
Harold Bamberg, a former wartime pilot, formed the airline on 14 April 1948 with a nominal capital of £100 as Eagle Aviation Ltd at Aldermaston. The initial fleet comprised two wartime bombers converted for carrying fruit and vegetables. The first aircraft to enter service was a converted Halifax Mk 8 with the civil registration G-AJBL. It operated Eagle's first commercial flight, carrying a cargo of cherries from Verona to Bovingdon. It subsequently transported fruit from Italy and Spain for the Covent Garden merchants. It was joined by a second Halifax, registered G-ALEF and christened Red Eagle. Both aircraft saw extensive service along with a further two others during the Berlin Airlift.The airline acquired Air Freight Ltd with three more Halifaxes later the same year. Eagle acquired three Avro York aircraft in late 1949, followed by eight others, and used these until early 1955 for both passenger and freight charters. Eagle aviation moved to Luton in 1950. For most of its existence, the company's head office was located at 29 Clarges Street, Central London.
By 1951, Eagle Aviation had won its first regular Government trooping contracts, including the first regular contract awarded by the War Office for trooping flights between the UK and Singapore starting in August 1951. This helped keep its fleet of six Halifaxes and nine Avro Yorks busy and provided employment for 100 people including 12 pilots. Operations moved to Blackbushe Airport in 1952, followed a year later by the launch of secondary scheduled services in association with British European Airways, from whom Eagle had purchased a large fleet of Vickers Vikings.
Start of scheduled operations
During 1953, Eagle Aviation's steadily growing passenger charter operations included for the first time aerial cruises around the Mediterranean. Following Eagle's decision to sell the Yorks to rival UK independent Skyways for £160,000, the airline expanded from charter work into scheduled services from its new base at Blackbushe Airport, using Vickers Vikings. The first of these were acquired from Crewsair, another rival UK independent. Eagle, which by that time had set up Eagle Airways as a new company to run the scheduled side of the business, inaugurated its first scheduled service on 6 June 1953 from London to Belgrade, followed by London—Aalborg and London—Gothenburg. It also began operating domestic flights within the UK and additional international services to secondary western European destinations. Eagle's expansion was supported by 22 Vickers Vikings that had been retained from an earlier purchase of 37 former BEA examples.File:Vickers Viking 1B G-AIVO Eagle Aws Ringway 07.59 edited-2.jpg|thumb|right|Eagle Airways Vickers Viking at Manchester in July 1959
Entry into package holiday market
In 1954, the Ministry of Aviation granted Eagle permission to operate a limited programme of a new type of low-fare service that combined air travel and overseas holiday accommodation at a cost substantially below the aggregate of each individual component if purchased separately. This new concept enabled the airline to circumvent regulatory restrictions that prevented private airlines from competing with their state-owned counterparts. It also helped increase fleet utilisation.When the Thomas Cook & Son travel agency declined Eagle's offer to take on the role of the airline's tour operator, Eagle acquired the Sir Henry Lunn Ltd travel agency chain. This made the airline one of the pioneers of the British package holiday industry and probably marked the first occasion in the UK an airline became vertically integrated with its own in-house tour operator British Eagle also acquired the Polytechnic Touring Association in the 1950s and formed Lunn Poly from the two agencies in the mid-1960s.
Eagle's first inclusive tour flights operated to destinations in Italy and Spain. To make its packages more affordable and increase sales, Lunn began offering hire purchase facilities. Between 1955 and 1960, many of the airline's aircraft carried the Eagle Airways operating name.
By 1957, the summer IT programme included for the first time 15-day, all-inclusive packages to Spain's Costa Brava. These combined flights to Perpignan in Southern France with onward coach connections, with prices starting from £32.50 for travel on Mondays. 1957 was also the year Eagle joined IATA.
Branching out
On 26 July 1957, Eagle formed an overseas subsidiary, named Eagle Airways , in preparation for the launch of transatlantic scheduled services between Bermuda and New York, using Viscount 800 turboprop aircraft. Within a year of launching its first transatlantic scheduled route, the airline's North Atlantic scheduled operation extended to Montreal, Baltimore, Washington and Nassau.Acquisition of first imported aircraft
In 1958, Eagle acquired the first three of an eventual six Douglas DC-6s for long-range charter and scheduled operations. These were the airline's first pressurised aircraft. They were also its first imported aircraft. This acquisition marked an important change regarding UK airlines' aircraft procurement policies as new legislation permitted that aircraft imported from abroad – usually American models – could be paid for in dollars. The lack of access to foreign exchange to finance overseas aircraft purchases prior to the change in legislation had compelled all private UK airlines to equip their fleets either with British-built civilian/ex-military aircraft or war-surplus, or foreign-built military transport planes that had served with the RAF Transport Command — mainly Douglas Dakotas. Their state-owned counterparts had to seek Government dispensation to import foreign aircraft, which was only granted when no suitable British alternatives were available. These measures had been designed during the early post-war years to conserve as much of Britain's scarce US dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves as possible.Pioneering of low-fare scheduled services in the Western Hemisphere
Eagle Airways launched commercial operations in May 1958 between Bermuda and New York, competing head-on with three of the world's most powerful airlines – BOAC, Pan Am and Eastern Air Lines. Other regional services in the Western Hemisphere followed. Stimulated by low fares, traffic volumes on the Nassau—Miami and Bermuda—JFK sectors grew such that it was possible to run a four-times-a-day Viscount shuttle on the former and a similar, thrice-daily operation on the latter profitably. This increased Eagle's, as well as the overall British market share on these routes. This success provided the impetus for Eagle Airways to launch weekly low-fare through-plane scheduled services to London with all-coach-configured DC-6Cs. The use of a foreign-registered aircraft on the London route enabled it to circumvent restrictive licensing provisions Act 1960 ) as it only applied to UK aircraft. Bermuda's status as a British colony furthermore meant that no reciprocal approvals from overseas authorities were needed. Eagle's new direct Bermuda—London flights were a cheaper and faster alternative to BOAC's DC-7C services which routed via New York. However, the terms of the licence permitting Eagle to operate scheduled services on this route required it to share its revenues with BOAC.In November 1958, Eagle applied to the Air Transport Advisory Council, the contemporary UK Government department in charge of air transport economic regulation, for permission to offer low fares on existing and planned scheduled routes to Cyprus, Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore, the Bahamas, the Caribbean as well as East and West Africa. For instance, Eagle's £19 proposed fare to Malta compared with BEA's £52.60 and its £199 Singapore fare compared with a £351 fare charged by BOAC. This marked the first occasion on which a private British airline sought approval to offer scheduled fares that undercut the equivalent published fares of the state-owned airlines by a substantial margin. Eagle's low fares were designed to increase the British market share on routes the state airlines had monopolised by stimulating demand. The airline argued that the British economy as a whole would benefit if it was granted permission to offer these fares, as a consequence of additional foreign exchange earnings accruing to the UK Exchequer that resulted from boosting Britain's share of total traffic. Loss-making BEA and BOAC lodged objections with ATAC against Eagle's low-fare proposals, which were upheld. By the spring of 1959, Eagle Airways was operating scheduled passenger flights with Vickers Viscount 805 turboprop aircraft between Bermuda and Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and New York City in the U.S. as well as between Bermuda and Montreal in Canada.
Breaking even on scheduled operations
Following six years of losses, Eagle managed to break even on what it claimed to be Britain's biggest network of independent-operated scheduled services comprising 12 routes to Europe by 1959. By the late 1950s, all aircraft carried the Eagle Airways name.The early 1960s (1960–1963)
Following Blackbushe's closure to commercial air traffic in 1960, Eagle moved its base to London Heathrow, then simply known as London Airport.Eagle along with British United Airways — its principal contemporary independent competitor – had successfully lobbied the Government to bring about a change in legislation that had given their state-owned counterparts a virtual monopoly on scheduled services. This resulted in the Civil Aviation Act of 1960, which abolished BEA's and BOAC's statutory monopoly on principal domestic and international scheduled routes and – theoretically – gave the independents equal opportunities to develop such routes in their own right. Eagle concurred with BUA and Caledonian Airways — an independent upstart that would subsequently compete with it head-to-head for a licence to operate transatlantic scheduled services — that running a fully fledged scheduled operation was the only way to build an airline with a long-term, stable future. It argued that the non-scheduled nature of its business – mainly trooping, ad hoc charters and IT flying – made planning ahead difficult because of extreme seasonality and generally low margins. Therefore, Eagle saw its future primarily as an international scheduled passenger and freight carrier with transatlantic ambitions.