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An airline is an organization providing aviation services to passengers and/or cargo. It owns or leases airliners with which to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for reasons of mutual benefit. Airline services may be intercontinental, intracontinental, regional or domestic and may be operated as scheduled services or charters.
In view of the congestion apparent at many international airports, the ownership of slots at certain airports (the right to take-off or land an aircraft at a particular time of day or night) has become a significant tradeable asset in the portfolios of many airlines. Clearly take-off slots at popular times of the day can be critical in attracting the more profitable business traveller to a given airline's flight and in establishing a competitive advantage against a competing airline. If a particular city has two or more airports, market forces will tend to attract the less profitable routes, or those on which competition is weakest, to the less congested airport, where slots are likely to be more available and therefore cheaper.
Other factors, such as surface transport facilities and onward connections, will also affect the relative appeal of different airports and some long distance flights may need to operate from the one with the longest runway.
Where an airline has established an engineering base at an airport then there may be considerable economic advantages in using that same airport as a preferred focus (or "hub") for its scheduled flights.
Each operator of a scheduled or charter flight uses a distinct airline call sign when communicating with airports or air traffic control centres. Most of these call-signs are derived from the airline's trade name, but for reasons of history, marketing, or the need to reduce ambiguity in spoken English (so that pilots do not mistakenly make navigational decisions based on instructions issued to a different aircraft), some airlines and air forces use call-signs less obviously connected with their trading name. Click on the previous link to discover some of these less obvious radio call-signs.
After the Wright brothers flew the first heavier than air airplane in 1903, the airplane was not widely used commercially for over a decade, and was viewed mainly as a toy. In 1914, the world's first scheduled airline service began between Tampa, Florida and St. Petersburg, Florida, charging five dollars for each one-way trip across Tampa Bay.
Following World War I, the United States found itself swamped with aviators. Many decided to take their war-surplus aircraft on barnstorming campaigns, performing acrobatic maneuvers to woo crowds. In 1918, the United States Postal Service won the financial backing of Congress to begin experimenting with air mail service, initially using Curtiss Jenny aircraft that had been procured by the United States Army for reconaissance missions on the Western Front. The Army was the first to fly these missions, but quickly lost the contract when they proved to be too unreliable. By the mid-1920's, the Postal Service had developed its own air mail network, based on a transcontinental backbone between New York, New York and San Francisco, California. To supplant this service, they offered twelve contracts for spur routes to independent bidders: the carriers that won these routes would, through time and mergers, evolve into Braniff Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines (originally a division of Boeing), Trans World Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and Eastern Airlines, to name a few.
Passenger service during the early 1920's was sporadic at best: most airlines at the time were focused on carrying bags of mail. In 1925, however, Ford Motor Company bought out the Stout Aircraft Company and began construction of the all-metal Ford Trimotor, the first successful American airliner. With a 12-passenger capacity, it made passenger service potentially profitable. Air service became parallel to rail service in the American transportation network.
At the same time, Juan Trippe began a crusade to create an air network that would link America to the world, and he achieved this goal through his airline, Pan American World Airways, with a fleet of flying boats that linked Los Angeles to Shanghai and Boston to London. Pan Am was the only U.S. airline to go international before the 1940s, and quickly became a symbol of the potential of the American airline industry.
With the introduction of the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-3 in the 1930s, the U.S. airline industry continued to build up profitability, despite the Great Depression. This trend continued until the beginning of World War II.
The first countries in Europe to embrace air transport were France and Germany. France begain an air mail service to Morocco in 1919 that was bought out in 1927, renamed Aeropostale, and injected with capital to become a major international carrier. In 1933, Aeropostale went bankrupt, was nationalized, and became Air France.
The German airline industry began with Lufthansa in 1926, which, unlike other airlines at the time, became a major investor in airlines in the developing world, founding Varig and Avianca. German airliners built by Junkers, Dornier, and Fokker were the most advanced in the world at the time. The peak of German air travel came in the mid-1930's, when Nazi propaganda ministers approved the start of commercial zeppelin service: the big airships were a symbol of industrial might, but the fact that they used flammable hydrogen gas raised safety concerns that culminated with the Hindenburg disaster of 1937.
United Kingdom's flag carrier during this period was Imperial Airways, which became BOAC (British Overseas Airlines Co.) in 1939. Imperial Airways used huge Handley-Page biplanes for routes between London, the Middle East, and India: images of Imperial aircraft in the middle of the Rub'al Khali, being maintained by Bedouins, are among the most famous pictures from the heyday of the British Empire.
World War II, like World War I, brought new life to the airline industry. Many airlines in the Allied countries had become rich by leasing their airplanes to the military, and were eager to spend this money on the new flagships of air travel such as the Boeing Stratocruiser, Lockheed Constellation, and Douglas DC-6. Most of these new aircraft were based on American bombers such as the B-29, which had spearheaded research into new technologies such as pressurization.
In the 1950s, the De Havilland Comet, Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8, and Sud Aviation Caravelle became the first flagships of the Jet Age in the West, while the Soviet Union bloc countered with the Tupolev Tu-104 and Tupolev Tu-124 in the fleets of state-owned carriers such as Aeroflot and Interflug. The Vickers Viscount and Lockheed L-188 Electra inaugurated turboprop transport.
The next big boost for the airlines would come in the 1970's, when the Boeing 747, McDonnell Douglas DC-10, and Lockheed L-1011 inaugurated widebody ("jumbo jet") service, which is still the standard in international travel. The Tupolev Tu-144 and its Western counterpart, Concorde, made supersonic travel a reality. In 1972, Airbus began producing Europe's most commercially successful line of airliners to date.
Starting in the late 1970s, hit by the oil crisis and airline deregulation, many airlines across the world entered financial difficulties. New low-cost airlines, such as Laker Airways and Southwest Airlines, emerged as competitors to older "legacy" carriers. Pan Am, Eastern, and many other large airlines disappeared by the 1990s. Although the ensuing decade brought record profits to airlines, particularly in the United States, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks greatly stifled this boom.
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See: Code sharing
Code sharing is a business term used in the airline industry for a procedure whereby one airline operates a service using its own flight number, e.g. XX123 and one or more other airlines, in agreement with airline XX, apply their own "code share" flight number to this operation. Most if not all major airlines nowadays have partnerships with other airlines, so called airline alliances. Code sharing is a major reason to start such a partnership.
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... see, pilots, flight attendants
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