Paul Jarvis - Mapping The Airways

First published 2016

Amberley Publishing
The Hill, Stroud
Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

www.amberley-books.com

Copyright Paul Jarvis & British Airways, 2016

The right of Paul Jarvis & British Airways to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 9781445654645 (PRINT)
ISBN 9781445654652 (eBOOK)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typesetting by Amberley Publishing.
Printed in the UK.

British Airways has the richest history in world aviation. I say that not out of chauvinism but out of honest reflection on the contribution to global transport made by my airline as we know it today and its forerunner companies.

Barely a decade and a half after the dawn of commercial flying in Europe, Britains Imperial Airways had an unparalleled route network that stretched to southern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, India, Hong Kong and Australia. Journeys that would previously have taken several weeks could be accomplished in a few days.

Post-war, the story of expansion and innovation continued. Imperial had evolved into three new nationalised companies, BEA (for flights within Europe), BSAA (for South America and the Caribbean) and BOAC (for the rest of the world). Regular services across the Atlantic, to the Far East and all points in between became the norm. In 1952, BOAC started the worlds first scheduled jet service, flying an aircraft that cruised at 500 mph comparable with todays airliners and far faster than its predecessors. Flying times tumbled and the world started to shrink.

In 1958, BOAC beat the combined might of the American carriers to operate the first jet service between London and New York. When the jumbo jet started the era of mass long-haul travel, BOAC was quick to grasp its potential and large orders followed.

Forty years ago this year, BOAC and BEA were formally brought together as British Airways. With nearly 200 destinations in 88 countries, it had the most extensive route network in the world. Another aviation first soon ensued with the launch of supersonic travel. Though Concorde retired a decade ago, its iconic image lives on around the globe as a lasting symbol of British Airways innovation.

That pioneering tradition has gone on, finding different forms of expression as times change. Privatisation, fully flat beds, online check-in, environmental performance British Airways is proud of its record as an industry leader right up to the present day.

That is part of the culture that underpins our motto, To Fly. To Serve. Those words were painted on our early aircraft and are emblazoned on our fuselages today. Whoever we are, our history is always part of us. The history of British Airways is indeed rich, and there is no better demonstration of that fact than this fascinating book.

Keith Williams
Executive Chairman, British Airways, March 2016

The idea for this book came from a realisation that there were quite a number of books out there relating to mapping all sorts of things from railways to roads and even British history, but none that I had seen on what I call Mapping the Airways. I mean that in the widest literal sense; in essence, the use of maps in UK civil aviation primarily as a promotional medium but also as a practical device for finding the way.

Fortuitously, as curator of the British Airways Heritage Collection, Ive access to a wide range of media that show maps in different forms from advertising posters to all manner of informational and promotional literature right down to real maps used to plot an aircrafts route and landing place. Im also very keen on maps and as a sort of geographer like nothing more than poring over a map, the more detailed the better. Writing this book was therefore more of a delight than a challenge, although when trying to interpret why a map had been used in a particular way it was soon clear I did not know quite as much as I had thought.

What shone through, however, was the innovative and creative ways that maps have been used in promoting the business of commercial aviation. In the air, pilots have progressed from the use of bookshop road maps in the 1920s to twenty-first-century GPS navigation. Many of the artworks and charts are unique in themselves and we are very fortunate they have survived at all. As part of our collection they represent a major national asset, given that for nearly seventy years between 1924 and 1987 British Airways and its predecessor airlines were the nationalised air carriers of the United Kingdom.

Putting all this material together was, as ever, a team effort. The collections team of volunteers have all had a part to play in this story, using their particular skills and knowledge. Christine Quicks patience in scanning and preparing several hundreds of images while I worried over which ones to use has to be commended. Adrian Constables photography and Bob Petries digital imaging skills also allowed many images to be seen probably for the first time for over ninety years. Jim Daviess and Alan Cavenders diligent fact-checking and proofreading also kept the text accurate and on track.

Paul Jarvis
British Airways Heritage Collection

Our story begins in the early years of the twentieth century with an airline advertising poster from around late 1919 or early 1920. We cant be precise. This poster, from British Airways predecessor airline Aircraft Transport & Travel, is a good starting point because, prior to the start of AT&Ts commercial passenger operations on 25 August 1919, there really were no airways by any airline of any consequence to map. Aviation was still in its infancy, although technically and militarily it had grown significantly during the years of the First World War, between 1914 and 1918. Before that, aviation of any sort was often still experimental, with aircraft hardly able to fly with one person the pilot let alone any passengers.

AT&Ts poster, while not containing a map of any description, highlights its very first route between London and Paris. It hardly needed a map to show prospective customers where they were going and, I suspect, the commercial artist who painted the poster probably thought similarly. The most obvious thing to illustrate was the service product itself, an aeroplane in this case a De Havilland DH16 four-seater and the eye-catching, iconic landmarks of St Pauls Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower; together, they could leave no one in doubt what the service was about and where it was going. These sort of almost storybook-style illustrations, coupled with an appropriate message, became key points for airline advertising for many decades.

Fifteen years later and we come to the title of this chapter. Imperial Airways, another predecessor airline of British Airways, is flying across continents. How best, then, to advertise in the 1930s an air journey from the heart of Europe to the heart of Africa? This was a quite long and complex journey in those days, involving several changes of aircraft and even two days on the train between Paris and Brindisi in Italy. Apart from illustrating any text, a map would seem a natural inclusion to put elements of the journey into a neat visual context. A map was not used, however, but a timetable, a very useful figurative guide used successfully for many years by other transport modes, especially the railways. It was a very obvious thing to copy. In fact, from a purely practical perspective, a timetable was better than a map because it could show very accurately the various combinations on this complex journey of route, days of travel and flight timings. Personally, Id still have preferred a map (or at least a map as well), but the inclusion of a timetable allowed more specific information to be added which, for a complex journey, made a lot of sense.