Reach for the Skies by Richard Branson

Author:Richard Branson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Freddie went into the scrap business full-time, turning old warplanes into aluminum ingots. He claimed he was more than happy servicing and recycling planes, and that his flying days were over. But by then the business had gotten into his blood.

First, in 1949, he flew joyrides and charters for Billy Butlin’s new postwar holiday camps. Then, once the “nine out of ten” little air companies set up after the war were dead and gone, and seeing that the government, too, was a large and growing customer for charter air services, Freddie bit the bullet and set up an airline.

It didn’t take him long to run up against the petty regulations restricting the development of charter air. The stupidity of the thing drove him to the breaking point: why couldn’t passengers who wanted a cheap flight simply line up for a ticket at the bloody airport, the way they already did at railway stations and bus terminals?

Freddie turned up at Gatwick with his lawyer and a Bible and got his passengers to swear allegiance to their make-believe clubs. The authorities were unimpressed; some 30 people were removed from a flight. “I shouted and got headline treatment and vowed to fight it,” Freddie recalled. Seven years of legal battles followed.

Throughout the 1970s, Freddie fought through every imaginable obstruction to realize his dream. On June 15, 1971, Laker Airways submitted an application to launch Skytrain, the world’s first lowfare scheduled service between London and New York. The “walk on, walk off” operation would sell tickets to whoever turned up first. The fares were incredibly low: £32.50 in winter, £37.50 in summer—a third of what it would cost you to fly with a flag carrier. His opponents tried to force Skytrain to use Stansted Airport rather than Gatwick, and even tried to limit the number of seats he could sell each day to 189, though his DC-10s had room for 345!

“I fought, kicked, shouted at them day after day,” Freddie recalled. When he won through the British courts the right to fly across the Atlantic, he had to fight the same battles all over again in the courts of the United States where Pan Am and TWA did everything possible to keep him out. Nevertheless, in June 1977, President Jimmy Carter finally gave Skytrain the green light.

“I fought, kicked, shouted at them day after day.”

Freddie Laker

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