FLYING THE FLAG

Also by Hans-Liudger Dienel

INGENIEURE ZWISCHEN HOCHSCHULE UND INDUSTRIE:

Kaltetechnik in Deutschland und Amerika, 1870 bis 1930

Also by Peter Lyth

INFLATION AND THE MERCHANT ECONOMY: The Hamburg

Mittelstand 1914-1924
Flying the Flag
European Commercial
Air Transport since 1945

Edited by

Hans-Liudger Dienel
Managing Director
Centre for Technology and Society
Technical University
Berlin

and

Peter Lyth
Fellow, Research Institute
Deutsches Museum
Munich

palgrave macmillan
*
Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 1 © Hans-Liudger Dienel and Peter Lyth 1988
Chapter 2 ©Nicolas Neiertz 1998
Chapter 3 ©Peter Lyth 1998
Chapter 4 © Hans-Liudger Dienel 1998
Chapter 5 ©Marc Dierikx 1998
Chapter 6 © Amilcare Mantegazza 1998
Chapter 7 ©Joanna Filipczyk 1998
Chapter 8 © Roger E. Bilstein 1998
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 978-0-333-67354-6

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Contents
List of Plates vii
Preface ix
Notes on the Contributors xi
Abbreviations xii
1 Introduction
Peter Lyth and Hans-Liudger Dienel 1

2 Air France: an Elephant in an Evening Suit?

Nicolas Neiertz 18

3 Chosen Instruments: the Evolution of British Airways

Peter Lyth 50
4 Lufthansa: Two German Airlines
Hans-Liudger Dienel 87

5 KLM: an Airline Outgrowing its Flag

Marc DieriIa: 126
6 Alitalia and Commercial Aviation in Italy
Amilcare Mantegazza 159

7 LOT: Connecting East and West in Poland

Joanna Filipczyk 195

8 Airlines, Entrepreneurs and Bureaucrats:

the American Experience
Roger E. Bilstem 223

Bibliography 253
Glossary 258
Index 260

v
List of Plates
1. La Grande Nation dans tous les ciels: Air France in the 1950s (Musee
Air France)
2., Max Hymans, Chairman of Air France from 1948 to 1961 (Musee Air
France)
3. The twin-engined Caravelle was an early success for the French civil
aircraft industry (Aeroports de Paris)
4. Paris Orly airport in 1963 (Air France Communications)
5. Lunch on board a Concorde, 1995 (Aeroports de Paris)
6. Outback service: BEA Island Rapide landing on the beach at Barra,
Scotland, in 1953 (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
7. Speed was the theme of BOAC advertising at the beginning of the jet
age in 1960 (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
8. Sombre faces as the Comet 4 is handed over to BOAC by de Havilland
in 1958 (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
9. The swinging sixties: a BEA 1tident (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
10. Concorde was always a patriotic undertaking: BA advertisement, 1979
(Deutsches Museum, Munich)
11. Lufthansa turned the Germans' traditional image to its advantage:
advertisement, 1963 (Lufthansa AG)
12. Aircraft production at the East German VEB Flugzeugwerke in 1959.
On the right is the production line of the IL-P14; in the foreground
the East German P-152 jet airliner (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
13. Because of its maintenance requirements, the Lockheed L-1049G
Super Constellation was called 'Super Complication' by Lufthansa
mechanics: servicing one of its Curtiss Wright turbo-compound
engines at Frankfurt Airport in 1957 (Lufthansa AG)
14. Skirts and profits rose steadily until 1970: Lufthansa'stewardess uni-
forms from 1968 (Lufthansa AG)
15. Lufthansa was the first airline to introduce Boeing 747s as cargo jets:
taking off from Hong Kong in 1987 (Lufthansa AG)
16. Open to the world: the KLM girl from the 1960s (KLM)
17. Service on board a KLM DC-6 in the early 1950s (KLM)
18. The cosmopolitan airline: a KLM DC-8 honouring Sir Isaac Newton
in 1961 (Amsterdam Schiphol Airport)
19. Loading cargo into a Boeing 747-300 combi (Amsterdam Schiphol
Airport)
20. Global partnership: KLM ground staff working on a Northwest Air-
lines DC-10 (Amsterdam Schiphol Airport)

vii
viii List of Plates

21. Alitalia's first flight from Thrin to Rome, 5 May 1947 (Alitalia)
22. For its short- and medium-haul routes, Alitalia used French Cara-
velles with their distinctive triangular windows (Deutsches Museum,
Munich)
23. Pope Paul VI was fond of flying: disembarking from an Alitalia air-
craft when he was still Archbishop of Milan (Alitalia)
24. The merger of LAI and Alitalia in October 1957 (Alitalia)
2S. National pride ran high when Pope John Paul II travelled to Warsaw
on board a LOT aircraft in 1987. He was welcomed by LOT's General
Director, Jerzy Slowinski (LOT)
26. A LOT Lisunov Li-2P, the Soviet copy of the DC-3, at Warsaw's
Ok'rcie airport in the late 1940s (LOT)
27. LOT made repeated attempts to introduce Western aircraft. In the
1960s three Vickers Viscounts were purchased (LOT)
28. The Ilyushin 11-18, workhorse of LOT's eastern European routes until
their replacement with Western aircraft after 1989 (LOT)
29. On 26 October 1958 Pan American inaugurated its Boeing 707 jet
service with a musical fanfare (Roger E. Bilstein)
30. A proliferation of commuter airlines in the 1980s created a market for
small transports like Fairchild's Metro II (Fairchild Aircraft Corpora-
tion)
31. The air freight business proved profitable enough to encourage major
airlines like American to configure Boeing 707s and Boeing 747s as
dedicated freight haulers (American Airlines)
 Preface

The idea for this book grew out of a chance conversation between the editors
at Munich's Deutsches Museum in 1995. At the time we were both working
on airline histories and had become interested in the distinguishing features
of Europe's flag-carriers, as well as the deep and historical divide between
the air transport industries in Europe and America .. We were also struck by
the fact that although the international airline industry was at a critical
juncture in its history, with deregulation and strategic alliances making head-
lines in the press, economic and transport historians had paid it astonishingly
little attention. This was particularly the case with Europe's airlines, about
which no comparative history had ever been written.
In the course of the next year we gathered together a number of airline
historians from different countries to talk about Europe's flag-carriers and to
plan this volume. In addition to the Europeans we invited Professor Roger
Bilstein to monitor our progress and write a concluding analysis from the
American perspective. Our discussions took place in formal workshop ses-
sions at the Deutsches Museum and occasionally in a neighbouring beer
garden.
Perhaps one of the reasons why a comparative history of European airlines
has never been produced is that studies across international borders are not
only hard work but also logistically complex. Different scholars, writing in
different languages, have to agree on common themes and goals, and be
brought together within a uniform but fruitful working environment. If we
have come anywhere close to succeeding in this task, then our colleagues
deserve the credit and we would like to salute their good-humoured readi-
ness to write - and then rewrite - their chapters at the command of a
despotic English editor.
Our work would not have been possible without generous support from
the F1ughafen Frankfurt Stiftung. This foundation also contributed towards
the funding of additional editorial meetings in Berlin, as well as a combined
presentation by all the contributors to the London meeting of the Society for
the History of Technology (SHOT) in 1996. We are very grateful and we
would like to offer our thanks to the Stiftung's managing director Wolfgang
Scherer.
Many people have helped in the book's preparation and we would like to
take this opportunity to acknowledge their assistance and thank them. Bruce
Seely, Helmuth 1tischler and Burghard Ciesla offered advice and ideas,
Soren Marotz prepared the figure in Chapter 1 and the index, and Kathy
Franz and Stefan Zeilinger took the minutes of our preliminary discussions.

ix
x Preface

Marc Dierik:x made valuable comments on an early draft of the Introduction.

The Deutsches Museum has been especially helpful in providing accommo-
dation and a meeting room for the workshops, and we are also grateful to
Eva Mayring, the head of the Museum's Special Collections and to Albert
Limmer. Amongst the airline archives, some have been rather more welcom-
ing than others, as one would expect. We would like to thank them all and to
mention Lufthansa, where the archivist Werner Bittner and the head of the
picture collection Gerd Rebenich have been generous with their assistance.

Hans-Liudger Dienel Peter Lyth

Berlin Munich
May 1998
Notes on the Contributors
Roger Bilstein is Professor of Aviation and Aerospace History at the Uni-
versity of Houston. Among his many works are Flight in America: from the
Wrights to the Astronauts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994) and The Amer-
ican Aerospace Industry: from Workshop to Global Enterprise (New York,
1996.)

Hans-Liudger Dienel is Managing Director of the Centre for Technology and

Society at the Technical University Berlin, Germany. He has edited, with
Helmuth lTischler, Geschichte der ZukunJt des Verkehrs. Verkehrskonzepte von
der frUhen Neuzeit bis zum 21. lahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1997) and is currently
writing a book on the history of commercial aviation and competing trans-
port modes in Germany between 1945 and 1995.

Marc Dierikx is an independent scholar based in the Netherlands. His latest

book is Fokker. a Transatlantic Biography (Washington, DC, 1997).

Joanna Filipcyzk teaches economic history at the University of Krakow in

Poland.

Peter Lyth is a Fellow at the Forschungsinstitut of the Deutsches Museum in

Munich, Germany, and an associate of the Business History Unit at the
London School of Economics. He has published numerous articles on civil
aviation and is currently writing on British Airways.

Amilcare Mantegazza is an economic historian at the University of Milan.

He is the author of L'Atm di Milano 1861-1972: un secolo di trasporto urbano
tra finalita pubbliche e vincoli di bilancio (Milan, 1993) and is now writing a
book on A1italia.

Nicolas Neiertz is professeur agrege at the Conservatoire National des Arts

et Metiers in Paris. His latest book is Les Aeroports de Paris. (Paris, 1997).

xi
Abbreviations
AEA Association of European Airlines
APEX Advanced Purchase Excursion fare
AlLB Air 1tansport Licensing Board (UK)
SA British AilWays
BAA British Airports Authority
BEA British European AilWays
BOAC British Overseas AilWays Corporation
BCat British Caledonian AilWays
BSAA British South American AilWays
CAA Civil Aviation Authority (UK)
CAB Civil Aeronautics Board (US)
CRS Computer Reservation System
CSA CeskoSlovenske Aerolinie (CZ)
EC/EU European Community/European Union
ECAC European Civil Aviation Conference
lATA International Air Transport Association
ICAO International Civil Aviation Organisation
KLM Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij (NL)
LOT Polskie Linie Lotnicze (PL)
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
Pan Am Pan American AilWays
SABENA Societe Anonyme Beige d'Exploitation de la
Navigation Aerienne
SAS Scandinavian Airline System
SST Supersonic 1tansport (aircraft)
STOL Short Thkeoff and Landing (aircraft)
TWA 1tans World Airlines
UTA Union de 1tansport Aerien (France)

xii