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1920s Aviation Boom: Birth Of Commercial Aviation | Early Aviation | Spark > .
Imperial Airways was the early British commercial long-range airline, operating from 1924 to 1939 and principally serving the British Empire routes to South Africa, India and the Far East, including Australia, Malaya and Hong Kong. The airplanes provided seats for about 20 passengers, typically businessman or colonial administrators. Accidents were frequent: in the first six years, 32 people died in seven incidents. Imperial Airways never achieved the levels of technological innovation of its competitors, and was merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1939. BOAC in turn merged with the British European Airways (BEA) in 1974 to form British Airways.
The establishment of Imperial Airways occurred in the context of facilitating overseas settlement by making travel to and from the colonies quicker, and that flight would also speed up colonial government and trade that was until then dependent upon ships. The launch of the airline followed a burst of air route surveying in the British Empire after the First World War, and after some experimental (and often dangerous) long-distance flying to the margins of Empire.
Imperial Airways were the forerunner of BOAC, BEA and the British Airways of today. In 1924, the British Government amalgamated many of the complicated array of pioneering small British airlines into one company, Imperial Airways. Original newsreels give us a fascinating and detailed insight into early operations from London s first airport in Croydon - At first, the passengers flew in comfort while the pilot still sat in an open cockpit! By 1926, there were whole fleets of airliners and new flying boats were commissioned. Amy Johnson arrived from Australia in 1929 and by 1930 the new Handley Page four-engined airliners became reality. Pioneering is dangerous - as the R-101 Airship crash proved to the airlines. Imperial Airways even experimented with a radio link between The Flying Scotsman and one of its aircraft. Imperial Airways flew the first car and even transmitted Jack Hylton and his band live from the air. Throughout the 1930s, Imperial Airways kept expanding throughout the Empire over to Australia. We spend 24 hours in Sharjah and witness a nasty crash at Croydon! 1936 saw the birth of the new giant Empire flying boats and in 1937, Imperial Airways became air partners with Pan American and trans-oceanic flying was born. The hazards of ice, early air-to-air refuelling and the Short Mayo Composite aircraft are also shown and explained. Aircraft included : Handley Page W8, W9, W10 and HP42. Armstrong Whitworth Argosy and Atalanta. De Havilland DH50, DH66, DH86, DH91 and Albatross. Short S.8 'Calcutta', S.23 & S.30 'Empire' Flying Boats and the Mayo Composite The R-101 Airship and the Lockheed Electra
Comment: First flight of the Handley-Page HP.42, November 14, 1930, from Handley-Page Aerodrome, Radlett, Herts. The "German challenge" was the Junkers G.38, a 30-seat monoplane which first flew late in 1929. The famous Dornier Do X flying boat was of course much larger, but not a land plane.
As Mr Handley-Page points out, the liner came in 2 models: HP.42E for the eastern air routes (Cairo based), carrying 24 passengers plus extra freight and mails, and HP.42W for the western (European) routes, capacity 40 passengers. Four of each type were built, serving with Imperial Airways from 1931-'39 and then impressed into the RAF. All were destroyed in various accidents by 1941, including the herein featured "Hannibal", lost at sea with 8 aboard over the Gulf of Oman in 1940.
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