The five most influential airlines in history

From Pan Am to Emirates, these carriers flew higher, shaping modern aviation – and changing travel forever

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The man who built Europe’s first budget airline, J Martin Schröder, died at the age of 93 last month. While not a household name in Britain, his influence reached far beyond his native Netherlands. His eponymous startup, Martinair, challenged KLM, the mighty Dutch national carrier, and created a template for the next generation of low-cost aviation entrepreneurs – Michael O’Leary at Ryanair and Stelios Haji-Ioannou at easyJet – to follow.
His Telegraph obituary recalls Schröder’s masterstroke “was to see how he could quickly convert his aircraft to and from passenger and cargo operations by simply adding or removing the seats. It could be done within hours, he discovered, though some of his passengers complained that they could still smell the horses, pigs or cows the aircraft had carried the night before”.
Which other airlines can lay a claim to being history’s most influential? Here’s my pick:
The British Overseas Airways Corporation pioneered the modern jet age, and went on to become “the world’s favourite airline” – British Airways. In May 1952, two BOAC de Havilland Comets, a four-engine aircraft about the size of a Boeing 737, took off from London and flew via Nairobi to Johannesburg and via the Far East to Tokyo, each carrying 44 passengers. They were the first scheduled international passenger jet services.
Six years later, the successor to Imperial Airways chalked up another “first”. On October 4 1958, BOAC’s De Havilland Comet 4 started flying from London to New York’s Idlewild Airport, now JFK. The transatlantic jet age had begun. By the late 1950s, BOAC would claim to be the “world wide airline”, with aircraft touching down on every continent except Antarctica.
When the Boeing 747 jumbo jet went into service in the 1970s, annual passenger numbers soared, and BOAC began turning a profit. Many regard the BOAC jumbo as the jet’s most beautiful livery.
Back then, popular routes were remarkably similar to those today – London to New York, which the 747 first flew, plus London to Johannesburg, Tokyo, and the Kangaroo Route to Sydney. In 1955, flying from London to Sydney took four days and included stops in Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Kolkata, Singapore, Jakarta and Darwin – a far cry from today. Qantas will soon begin the first non-stop flights from London, taking 19 hours. The most popular items on the menu in the 1950s and 1960s were Maine lobster, parma ham cornets and roast sirloin of beef, with highballs and Campari and soda to drink.
BOAC merged with British European Airways in 1974 to form British Airways. To this day, BA uses BOAC’s call sign when talking to air traffic control: “speedbird”.
BOAC may have won the race to operate the first passenger jets, but it was Pan American Airways – Pan Am – that put the glamour into flying, coining the term “the jet set”. For some, the appeal was the trademark blue-and-white globe logo. For others, it was the stewardesses’ electric blue uniforms, with jaunty pillbox hats. Everyone agreed that its first transatlantic route in 1958, linking the city that never sleeps, New York, with the city of love, Paris, was the most romantic of the new jet age. Breakfast at Maxim’s, anyone?
Pan Am became part of popular culture, featuring in hit movies of the 1960s. In Dr. No, Sean Connery’s James Bond arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, aboard a Pan Am 707. The 1968 science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey included a futuristic Pan Am Space Clipper heading to a space station orbiting Earth. When the Beatles landed in New York in 1964 for their first US television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, they did not step off a BOAC jet but rather a Pan Am 707 named, appropriately enough, Clipper Defiance.
The job of Pan Am flight attendant – or air hostess, as it was then – was highly coveted. “It was one of the best jobs a woman could get,” Christel Vane, a former Pan Am hostess, told Telegraph Travel back in 2013. “There was nothing else open for women, unless you wanted to be a secretary.”
Pan Am was the first airline to operate Boeing’s 747, “the Queen of the Skies”, in 1970. It became America’s unofficial flag carrier, but its fortunes began to dip after the 1973 oil crisis when the price of oil quadrupled, making its 747 uneconomic to run. It also lacked domestic US services to help to fill its jets. By November 1978 it flew to just 65 airports. It lumbered on for another decade or so, before declaring bankruptcy in 1991.
Nevertheless, Pan Am remains so beloved that two decades after its demise it was the subject of a 14-episode television period drama starring Margot Robbie as a flight attendant. The original trademark blue bags with the white globe logo Robbie sported still fetch premium prices at auctions.
Although it might not feel like it, flying has never been cheaper than it is today, thanks to the rise of low-cost carriers. Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz owe their existence to Southwest, America’s biggest budget airline, and Southwest owes its existence to a Californian start-up called Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA). Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest, says that without PSA he would not have founded Southwest. So what was PSA and why was it so influential?
It first took to the skies on May 6 1949. A leased Douglas DC-3 aircraft departed from San Diego Airport, then known as Lindbergh Airfield, and carried 24 passengers to Oakland Airport, via Hollywood Burbank Airport. Its founder, Kenny Friedkin, took advantage of the fact that as an intrastate Californian airline it was not subject to US government pricing regulations to drive down fares.
He offered no frills. There was no branded check-in area at airports, and baggage was weighed using bathroom scales. There was only one class of travel and only one type of aircraft – an innovation copied by all modern low-cost carriers. PSA achieved profitability within its first year of operation.
In the 1950s Friedkin used Douglas DC-4 aircraft to expand, starting services from San Diego to San Francisco, San Jose and Ontario. The airline floated on the stock market in the 1960s, which gave it the capital needed to grow further using Boeing 727s and later Boeing 737 jets, which sported its trademark orange, red and white livery. With cheerful services and fares sometimes half that of rivals such as TWA, PSA marketed itself as “the world’s friendliest airline”.
In 1978, the US Airline Deregulation Act eliminated federal control over fares, ushering in a new era of competition and growth. PSA seized the opportunity to expand its network beyond California’s borders, reaching destinations including Reno, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. Anticipating massive growth, PSA ordered specially configured Lockheed L-1011 wide-body jets.
USAir, later rebranded as US Airways, acquired the airline for $400 million in 1986, and PSA was integrated into the larger carrier by 1988. But its successful business model is today the norm for short-haul operators around the world, including some carriers that perhaps ought to know better, among them British Airways.
Thirty years ago, few people had heard of Emirates or could place Dubai on a map. In those days, British Airways was the world’s favourite airline, carrying more international passengers than any other carrier. How things have changed. Today, Emirates is the largest international airline by scheduled available seat kilometres – 344.7 billion in 2023-24 – and its base, Dubai International, is the busiest international airport in the world, handling 90 million passengers a year.
Under two Britons – chief executive Sir Tim Clark and head of Dubai International Paul Griffiths – Emirates has created a hub-and-spoke model that has shifted the centre of gravity of global aviation away from Europe to the Gulf. Europeans travel through Dubai to go to Australia, Asia and Africa. Chinese passengers transit en route to Africa. So many Indians connect via Dubai rather than flying direct from Delhi or Mumbai that Emirates is nicknamed “India’s national carrier”.
Clark has also achieved the rare feat of “owning” passengers’ favourite aircraft. He has bought more than 120 Airbus A380 superjumbos and made them Emirates’ calling card by installing showers for first-class passengers, a large bar for business-class fliers, a class-leading premium-economy cabin in the front nose cone, and a not-too-shabby economy. Passengers love the innovations. By contrast, Emirates’ nearest rivals operate no more than a dozen A380s each.
If all that weren’t enough, Emirates has all but single-handedly created the city state of Dubai. Many locals in Dubai joke that it is “an airline with a city attached”.
The Flying Kangaroo has conquered what Vanessa Hudson, its chief executive, calls “the tyranny of distance”. It pioneered ultra-long-haul services, flying 15-hour routes from Sydney and Melbourne to Los Angeles, Dallas and Johannesburg – while also maintaining one of the best safety records in the industry. It moved on to establish the first non-stop routes from Europe to Perth, with 17-hour flights between London, Paris and Rome and Perth.
Now it is about to do something few aviation analysts thought possible: start 21-hour non-stop services from London and New York to Sydney and Melbourne. From 2026, QF2 will leave London before lunch and arrive in Sydney in the late afternoon of the following day. QF1 will leave Sydney in the evening and arrive in London the next morning.
At 10,978 miles, the services eclipse the longest flight at present – Singapore Airlines’ service between New York and Singapore, which travels 9,500 miles in just under 19 hours.
I was one of 34 passengers on a non-stop London-to-Sydney test run that Qantas flew in 2019, crossing 10 time zones and 11 countries. We headed east over northern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and China, and then south across the South China Sea, before making landfall near Darwin in the Northern Territory and crossing Australia. “You are now members of the Rare and Secret Order of the Double Sunrise,” announced Captain Helen Trenerry, as she flew Qantas flight 7879 into the second dawn of our record-breaking journey. “No one else has seen two sunrises in one flight and got to Sydney faster than you.”
The first paying passengers will follow a similar route in 2026 on an Airbus A350 jet built with an extra fuel tank and fewer seats than normal to reduce weight. Hudson reckons first class non-stop to Sydney will be the ultimate status symbol in air travel – “the new Concorde”. She is now working out how profane a fare she can charge. My money’s on £20,000 return.
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