Saturday 5 February 2022

skytrain

Offering regular long-haul service from London-Gatwick to JFK International in New York, West Berlin’s Tegel, and Hong Kong with routes to the Caribbean, Gran Canaria, Polynesia and so on, Laker Airways—founded in 1966 as a private charter company by Sir Freddie Laker—was one of the world’s first low-cost carrier, a casualty of the economic recession of the early 1980s had its last flight and declared bankruptcy on this day in 1982 with debts in excess of £270 million making it the largest corporate failure in Britain at the time. Second only to the shorter-lived though equally pioneering Loftleiรฐir of Iceland, the story of this entrepeneurial venture is at one and the same time both inspirational and cautionary, ahead of its time and informing later no-frills airlines and last-minute bookings plus democratising exotic travel, while also helping to draw out the worse aspects of the industry with over-capacity, ghost-flights, territorial hubs and the attendant negative impacts on the environment.