1924 saw the start of civil air travel with the start of the first Airline Imperial Airways, 21 years after the Wright brothers invented the first successful plane, the Kitty Hawk. Imperial airways made an order for the W8f. The W8f was the first purpose built aircraft civil airliner produced by the manufactures Handley Page. The W8f had three Rolls-Royce Eagle IX engines which allowed the aircraft to cruise at a speed of 85 miles per hour. The W8f was able to carry 12 passengers and 2 crew, in the first year Imperial Airways carried 11,395 passengers. In 1926 a flight route from London to Cape Town was launched. This was the bringing of intercontinental air travel. Subsequently flight roots to Australia, India and the far east all opened by 1932. Over the 1930’s the very first airlines relied on the colonies to maintain the demand for air travel. Due to the limit in space on the first airliners the price for air travel was high and the majority of passengers used airlines to travel on colonial business. It was the same for other airlines Air France and KLM’s whom also relied on the colonies in Africa and Asia for business. This resulted in many airlines going bankrupt and having to merge with other existing airlines for survival. Germany began using the Zeppelin and by 1931 had regular flights from Germany to South America becoming the first airline to fly across an ocean. But this ended due to the Hindenburg disaster in 1936. In the late 1930’s the Soviet airline Aeroflot dominated the civil aviation with it’s fleet of 3,000 aircraft.
The end of the war saw a huge increase in the demand of air transport. The war had seen a rapid increase in the technology of aircraft. The US B-29 bomber which was able to fly at greater speed of 350 miles per hour, and due to research into cabin pressurisation was able to fly at far higher altitudes of almost 32,000 feet which increased fuel efficiency. In the 1950’s saw the beginning of the jet age, which started with the Avro Lancastrian piston airliner. The jet engine allowed the first of the wide bodied jumbo jets to be used which allowed far more people to be transported on each aircraft. For example, the Boeing 707 was able to carry up to 219 passengers with a range of 5,750 nautical miles at a greater fuel efficiency and speed (around 560 miles per hour). The 707 had four JT3d-3B jet engines which used turbo compressors to supply air in the cabin allowing the plane to fly at an even greater altitude. As well as being able to travel greater distances it was also able to fly in a wider range of weather conditions. These new jet powered aircraft were able to travel greater distances which meant that the first daily flight from New York to Paris which took eight hours. This made everywhere in the world seem much closer allowing people to travel huge distances in far quicker times than where previously possible.
The next innovation in commercial aviation came in 1969 when the Boeing 747 had its first test flight and was first commercially used in 1978. The 747 could carry up to 467 passengers, covering a distance of 8000 miles at a speed of 655 miles per hour. Originally the 747 was planed to have a full second deck but this plan was scraped when there was a concern over evacuation roots, but it remained the largest passenger aircraft until the release of the Airbus A380 in 2007. The 747 had four JT9D which was the first high bypass ratio jet engine which produced 193,000N of thrust. The larger passenger capacity meant that prices of tickets where reduced which meant air travel was becoming more accessible to a greater number of people. The release of the Boeing 747 lead to a huge demand of jumbo jets which lead to more competition between manufacturers such as Airbus with the release of the A300. The A300 was a single deck with two Rolls-Royce RB211 engines. The A300 was smaller and lighter than the three engine American airliners which made it far more efficient. It was a wide body airliner with a 2-4-2 configuration in economy class. I was the first aircraft to use composite martials, specifically glass fibre reinforced plastic was used in the tail fin of the aircraft. Both of these aircraft are still in used today. From the 1960’s there has been a smaller rate of development, not including supersonic flight. Many developments where made to Boeing 747 from its first flight. For example, the newer 747-400 engines are 50% more powerful than the original 747’s as well as producing half the noise.
1969 saw the begin of supersonic flight with the birth of Concorde. Concorde was a joint engineering operation between BAC and Sud Aviation. It was the first aircraft to be able to reach supersonic speeds of up to 1,354 miles per hour at an altitude of 40,000 feet. To reach these speeds Concord’s four engines had to consume vast amounts of fuel which was one of the reasons the prices of a tickets on Concorde from London to New York were over £7,000, 30 times the price of a ticket on a standard flight. The Concorde’s delta shaped wing which produced large amount of lift at low speeds but minimal drag at high speeds. But in 2003 Concorde was grounded due to a number of different reasons. Firstly, after the crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000 which was caused due to the ignition of a fuel tank, sails of Concorde tickets were never as high as they were prior the crash. Another reason for failure was due to the vast amount of fuel that Concorde consumed, per person Concorde would do 17 miles to the gallon. This was becoming not only an environmental problem but a financial issue as well. Since Concorde was first designed oil prices had increased massively due to the crisis in the 1970s which meant that it was becoming extremely expensive to run. These were the two main reasons that resulted in the end of supersonic flight. In 1990 the plan for the new Airbus A380 was announced and took its first flight in 2007 with Singapore Airways. The A380 was the first full double decker civilian aircraft capable of over 850 passengers which is 40% higher capacity than the next largest civilian aircraft. It is also has 20% lower operating costs whilst being able to fly distances of 8,500 miles.
In less than 100 years the civilian aircraft has developed from the Handley Page W8f which was only able to carry 12 passengers and fly at 85 miles per hour to an aircraft which was capable of carrying 70 times the number of passengers at speers of 560 miles per hour. It has changed from a transport for only the rich to a service which transports almost four billion people a year.
Currently there are over 1,000 different airlines in operation today. Around 23,600 passenger aircraft currently in operation with over 9,000 flying at any one time. This would for obvious reasons take a huge amount of management to prevent aircraft from colliding and allow them to land at the right time. This is the responsibility of the air traffic control teams based around the world.