Imperial Airways

"Well now," said the Mayor, the long gold chain of office about her neck, "I'm going out to the States myself next year, and it gives me pleasure to see you here, for when I get out there, I'll feel that at least I know someone." Amelia was delighted and smiled broadly at the footman who attended the Mayor and whose mien was so serious behind a long waxed mustache.

From the tumult that was Southampton, Amelia was taken to London by Hubert Scott Payne, Director of Imperial Airways.

They rode in his Rolls-Royce, which was the same color as her yellow Peril back in Boston.

Amelia was still wearing her heavy flying suit, her only wardrobe, and one brightly colored scarf.

Better wear your parachute, Fred called over to her.

After the ride, or rather the swing aloft from extended rubber pads, AE went to the post office to have the covers canceled for her subscribing philatelists back home.

Out at the airport, the largest AE had ever seen, mechanics from Imperial Airways worked around the clock getting the Electra back into top-flight condition.

Two instrument specialists on loan from the Royal Air Force repaired the troublesome fuel flow indicator and the jammed mixture control lever.

Pan Am was watching.

Imperial Airways was watching.

Every major airline in the world was watching.

And at de Havilland, Jeffrey's team filed away everything they had learned.

The stops Scott and Campbell, Black and Parmentier, and Mole used, Rome, Baghdad, Karachi, Singapore, Darwin, were the rough outline of what became the Imperial Air Routes in the years following.

Imperial Airways was already reaching toward Australia.

The race was a proof of concept at full scale, flown at speed in public with the whole world watching.

The DC-2's performance was particularly significant.

The British government finally recognized that if Britain was going to have a civil aviation industry, it was going to need support until the routes could sustain themselves commercially.

The result was Imperial Airways, formed in nineteen twenty-four through a merger of the surviving British carriers with government backing to keep them airborne.

Imperial Airways would go on to become one of the great pioneering international airlines of the nineteen thirties, eventually evolving through British Overseas Airways Corporation into what flies today as British Airways.

So the line runs directly from that grass strip departure on August twenty-fifth, nineteen nineteen, through the collapse and the government rethink, and the formation of Imperial, all the way to the wide-body jets crossing the Atlantic today.

But the thing I keep coming back to is simpler than any of that.