The History and Evolution of Tourism by Christou Prokopis A.;

Author:Christou, Prokopis A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CAB International

6.2 The Growth of the Airline Industry and its Evolution

Schwaben was reported as a ‘high speed’ craft for passenger service (Dienstbach, 1911), being an ‘airship’ that operated sightseeing flights in Germany from 1911 to 1914. In 1914, Igor Sikorsky with a crew of three flew from St Petersburg to Kiev, a distance of around 10,000 km, with only one stop. Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War I led aircraft manufacturers to focus their attention on military aircraft rather than aircraft for commercial purposes. By the end of the war, in 1919, Deutsche Luft Reederei (ancestor of Lufthansa) started its passenger airline operations in Germany. During the 1920s several airlines were formed, such as Imperial Airways in Britain, KLM in the Netherlands and West Australian Airways. In the early 1930s the Boeing 247 was introduced by United Air Lines. At that time, it was recognized as the world’s first ‘modern’ airliner. Even though the first flight attendant (Heinrich Kubis) worked on a ‘zeppelin’ (airship) in 1912, cabin crew were introduced later on airplanes. For instance, in 1935 cabin crew made an entrance at KLM. Initially the airline employed only men as stewards, who were soon followed by women.

In 1943, with a journey that took more than 30 h and was referred to as ‘Double Sunrise Service’, Qantas Empire Airways inaugurated the world’s longest non-stop air route from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to the city of Perth in Western Australia. As expected, World War II impacted the global airline industry severely. For instance, civil flying in Japan ended suddenly when the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in August 1945. During the war airlines served different purposes. For example, during World War II, Qantas evacuated non-combatants from the line of fire. Delta Air Lines (in the USA) contributed to the war effort by modifying more than 1000 aircraft and training army pilots. After the war, airlines (like KLM) resumed their operations. Although chronologically speaking airlines commenced their operations during the Late Modern Period, it was only after the years following World War II that the global airline industry flourished. For instance, the expansion of airline traffic across the North Atlantic in the immediate post-war years was remarkable. Passenger traffic in the USA doubled from 6 million in 1945 to 12 million in 1946. In 1946, the one-millionth passenger boarded the Delta airline (Grossman, 2010; Davies, 2016; Gay, 2016; KLM, 2020; Qantas, 2020).

In the 1990s, liberalization of air transport in Europe relaxed previous constraints on where airlines could fly and at what prices. This led to a remarkable growth in air travel, particularly during the late 1990s, while eventually causing a significant growth in low-cost carriers (Mason et al., 2016). Low-cost airlines commenced their operations by offering ‘basic’ services at very low prices (Stoenescu and Gheorghe, 2017). By taking advantage of technological revolution, they created websites and booking systems that were clear and simple for the consumer to use. They eventually brought a service that was traditionally focused on a middle and upper class to all types of public (Rodríguez-García et al.

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