The First Airlines

The first airlines started operating with both airships and airplanes. Companies began selling tickets for regular passen­ger flights. The world’s oldest airline is the Dutch airline KLM, which started in 1919. Another pioneer airline was Australia’s Qantas (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service), which

was founded in 1920. Two early U. S. airlines were Pan American World Airways (1927) and Trans World Airlines (founded as Western Air Express in 1925).

In the early days, airplanes had lim­ited endurance, and airfields were few. Flying boats, however, were aircraft that could land anywhere there was water. They were used for the long routes that traveled over oceans. In 1936 Pan American Airways began a passenger service across the Pacific Ocean using the China Clipper flying boat. The China Clipper carried forty-three passengers on day flights. On night flights, the number was reduced to eighteen passengers, who were provided with beds.

Some of the first land-based passen­ger planes were large biplanes, such as Britain’s HP-42, an airliner with four engines that flew from 1930 to 1939. It carried thirty-eight passengers at around 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour). The HP-42 had to land every

500 miles (805 kilometers) to refuel on flights between England and India.

In the 1920s and 1930s, flights were often interrupted by unplanned land­ings, usually because of engine failure or bad weather. Pilots had just a few, basic instruments to guide them, radio was unreliable, airfields were few, and even heavy rain could cause a flight to be canceled.

In the 1930s manufacturers began to build all-metal monoplanes. Boeing’s Model 247 (1933) carried ten passengers at 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour). The reliable Douglas DC-3 (1935) popularized air travel, becoming one of the most famous airliners. Some DC-3s are still flying today. The world’s first pressurized airliner, the Boeing 307, was able to fly above most of the bad weather that made flights uncomfort­ably bumpy for passengers.

World War II (1939-1945) inter­rupted all commercial aviation. When the war ended, airlines resumed flights with converted warplanes. The British Lancastrian was a civil version of the Lancaster bomber,

О The first interior created for a U. S. passenger jet was displayed in New York City in 1956, when the manu­facturer Boeing showed off its 707 Jet Stratoliner cabin, complete with models posing as flight attendants.

while the Boeing Stratocruiser was based on the B-29 bomber. New planes of the 1950s included the last of the long – range propeller-driven airliners, such as the Lockheed Constellation. This air­plane carried up to 100 passengers from New York to London at 340 miles per hour (550 kilometers per hour), cruising at 23,000 feet (7,000 meters).

Small aircraft also developed for commercial use in this period. The Cessna 152 of the 1950s, for example, was a two-seat monoplane with a piston engine that gave it a top speed of 125 miles per hour (200 kilometers per hour).