2019-03-01 Business Traveller

WORDS JENNY SOUTHAN

AVIATION

ABOVE:Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic was launched in 1984

Despite recent failures, the

aviation industry looks set for

several new launches this year

S

ir Richard Branson relishes telling

the story of the birth of Virgin

Atlantic. On virgin.com he recalls

what happened in the early 1980s

when his flight from Puerto Rico

to the British Virgin Islands was

cancelled: “I had a beautiful lady

waiting for me in BVI and I hired a plane and

borrowed a blackboard and as a joke I wrote

‘Virgin Airlines’ on the top of the blackboard,

‘US$39 one way to BVI’. I went around all the

passengers who had been bumped and I filled up

my first plane.” After that he bought a second-

hand B747 and “made it that much more special

than all the other airlines

we were competing with”.

Unfortunately, many

new airlines end in failure

withinmonths–be

they wholesale start-ups,

rebrands or offshoots

of existing carriers –

provingthatitisn’tas

easy as Branson made it

look.Thereareallsorts

of factors involved, but

if an airline isn’t making

money fast, it won’t be

able to keep flying. The

cost of fuel is a huge

overhead, so if tickets

aren’t being sold, funds

soon run dry.

Sometimes airlines are trying something

different, such as operating with all-business class

layouts, but as we have seen from the historical

failures of Maxjet, Eos and Silverjet when they

tried this, as well as La Compagnie’s all-business

New York JFK route out of London Luton (the

French airline is hanging on to Paris Orly), taking

chances isn’t often rewarded.

FLYING

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businesstraveller.com MARCH 2019