Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

Flying empty seats is expensive. An airline that suddenly finds itself having to fly empty seats will bleed to death not over years or even months, but in a few weeks. An airline that’s healthy in March can be bankrupt by the middle of May. As a consequence, airlines are notorious for collapsing like houses of cards the moment they run into trouble—and rumors that a competitor is collapsing are self-fulfilling. By the time you’ve denied the rumors, you’re toast.

  To put a competing airline out of business, you don’t even need to lower your prices. All you have to do is suggest that the competitor has sustained a loss. Rumors of this sort are more credible if they’re aimed at low-cost airlines, because low-cost airlines work with narrower margins. Sometimes they’re less well capitalized. In addition, they are more reliant on leisure travel and the package-holiday industry.

  Why is this a factor? Well, imagine you’re a tour operator and you’ve just heard an unlikely and probably scurrilous rumor that your regular low-cost airline is running out of money. What do you do? Do you ignore the rumor? Certainly not! Putting your customers on an airline that might just go bankrupt is the last thing you’ll ever do. If the airline does file for bankruptcy, that’s it: your clients have lost their money—and you can expect a world of grief from your entire customer base.

  BA’s campaign of dirty tricks against Virgin Atlantic was the worst example of this kind of rumor-mongering. BA sank, finally, to outright industrial vandalism when a team accessed our booking system and messed with our passengers. But BA’s lamentable campaign was also, I suspect, one of the last of its kind. It is very unlikely indeed that a whispering campaign of the sort that killed Freddie’s business—and very nearly killed ours—would work today. The reason is simple: low-cost airlines like Stelios’s easyJet adopted the Internet and put many traditional travel agents out of business. “I knew nothing about the travel business,” Stelios told Simon Calder for No Frills, his book on budget air travel. “I had no allegiances, I had no friends in that industry, I just said this doesn’t make sense, we will not do it.”

  The Internet has saved the airline business a boatload of money over the years. We were paying 7 to 10 percent commission on every ticket to the travel agents. Cutting the agents out of the business was liberating. Stelios reckons it’s changed our industry more than the jet engine. “The jet engine was an improvement on the propellor and previous technology, but what really made it a mass market for everybody was the ability to fly someone for a pound. The ability to say ‘I will rationally and economically speaking let that seat go for £1’ is quite a revolution. You can only do that with the Internet.”

  Not every airline turned its back on the travel agents. Virgin Atlantic didn’t: as a business-class carrier, we needed them. And while the rise of the Internet spelled the death of many traditional agencies, others embraced the new technology and were transformed. Much more than mere bookers of tickets, today’s upmarket and specialist agencies, like Virtuoso in the United States and Elegant Resorts in Europe, thrive by organizing spectacular and thoughtful trips for their clients.

  There is no denying that competition from the Internet has stabilized our industry. This is because a scurrilous rumor racing from travel agency to travel agency doesn’t have the clout it once had. Today, the sort of rumors you’d have to sow to put a competitor out of business would have to address not just a handful of big, nervous agencies but the traveling population at large. Your claims would have to be so extreme, so outrageous, that your bluff would be called long before you could do any real damage. Plenty of airlines have folded in recent years, but most were the victim of their business plans and wider economic difficulties.

  There was a time, not very long ago, when air travel was for other people: the rich; the privileged; the powerful. The rest of us had to wait until 1952, when TWA launched the world’s first economy class!

  This is nothing: in the more remote parts of the world, whole generations have lived, breathed, and died in ignorance, mystified by the strange metal contraptions arcing over their heads. During the Second World War, for example, huge amounts of military equipment and supplies were airdropped onto New Guinea and the islands of the southwestern Pacific as part of the Allied campaign against the Empire of Japan. Clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, radios—an unlooked-for bounty piled up around the bemused islanders right up to the end of the war, by which time most of their religious practices and institutions had collapsed in confusion.

  The war ended and, overnight, the visitors left. Their airbases, deserted, reverted to jungle; and the flow of cargo ceased.

  The islanders, bereft and abandoned, attempted to revive the flow of strange gifts that had transformed their lives and culture. To bring the planes to their islands again, they set about imitating the rituals they had seen performed by visiting soldiers, sailors, and airmen. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They lit signal fires and torches. They semaphored wildly, stamping up and down their newly cleared “runways.” Many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw, hoping to attract more airplanes by a kind of sympathetic magic.

  Today, it is almost impossible for our imaginations to conjure that lost world. Aerospace technologies—aircraft and satellites, bombers and weather balloons—have made the world smaller. They have spread wealth and knowledge, disease and terror. If they have not yet spread universal happiness, they have at least done this: they have made just about everyone on the planet aware that we are one people, sharing one world.

  At its simplest, aviation overcomes almost all the boundaries set by geography. The Soviets understood this. To bind their huge Eurasian empire together, they created Aeroflot: an unlovely way to fly, but—as journalist Simon Calder reminds us—” the biggest no-frills airline of them all.” Even in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, you could travel from Minsk to Kiev, a distance of 275 miles, for just under £1.

  America’s domestic air market has shrunk the continent so effectively, visitors rarely grasp the nation’s true size. The United Kingdom is the size of California. The state of Texas is bigger than France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland combined. Crossing the state by car will take you most of a working day; by plane, about an hour.

  More than any other continent, Australia has been shaped by the airplane, and it’s not surprising that the story of aviation there stretches back to the pioneering days of manned and powered flight. The Australian Flying Corps’s involvement in the First World War left Australia with hundreds of highly trained pilots and a healthy supply of aircraft and hangars. Until the Second World War, Australians flew more miles, and boasted more pilots, than any other nation. The modern Australian state strung itself together with air services. Some of these were familiar, involving the carriage of cargo, mail, and passengers. (The success of the Australian domestic carrier Virgin Blue came as no surprise: without good domestic air services, Australia simply can’t function as a modern nation-state.) Others were unique to Australia, and addressed the particular challenges of that vast country and its tiny, scattered population. The most famous of these, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, was the brainchild of John Flynn, a Presbyterian minister and aviator born on November 25, 1880, the same year that Australia’s most celebrated outlaw Ned Kelly was executed.

  In 1911, when Flynn began his missionary work, only two doctors were serving an area of nearly 772,000 square miles! Flynn began establishing bush hospitals and hostels in remote outback areas, but these only scratched at the surface of the problem. As he campaigned for better medical care in the outback, Flynn told many true and harrowing stories. Perhaps the most distressing of these is the tale of Jimmy Darcy, a stockman who ruptured his bladder in a fall near Halls Creek, Western Australia, in August 1917. When the details of his harrowing and drawn-out death became known—a death that could have been avoided, had the nearest doctor not been ten full days’ travel away—it pushed news of the war off the front pages of Australia�
��s leading newspapers. More than any other single event, it provided the impetus for the organization that was to follow.

  Since 1928, the Royal Flying Doctor Service has sustained life in Australia’s outback.

  Lieutenant Clifford Peel, a young Victorian medical student with an interest in aviation, wrote to John Flynn, recommending the airplane as the only credible means of “ministering to the needs of the men and women scattered between Wyndham and Cloncurry, Darwin and Maree.” Peel had done his homework, too: his letter outlined costs, speeds, distances, and even a breakdown of the support facilities the service would require.

  Peel was killed flying over German battle lines shortly before the end of the war. But Flynn had his letter, and adopted his vision. On May 15, 1928, the Aerial Medical Service was established as a one-year experiment at Cloncurry, in Queensland. It serves the nation to this day.

  The practicalities of life in Australia have been shaped from the air. So has its culture. Australia’s white settlers have for years relied upon air travel to keep them in contact with their European inheritance. Today, cheap flights between Australia and Asia are shaping a new generation whose more self-confident, independent view of the world looks as much to Asia as to Europe. Native Australian and Maori cultures, meanwhile, are finally flourishing as their artists, musicians, and writers travel the globe, performing, writing, and filming their stories for audiences in every imaginable cultural setting.

  Cultures have their pioneers, just as industries do. How many pioneers of all sorts has Virgin Atlantic carried over the years? How many adventures has it made possible? Businesspeople, off to open up new markets; vacationers, steeling themselves for a couple of weeks surrounded by strangers, strange customs, and strange ideas; writers, journalists, and filmmakers in pursuit of stories, literally to the far ends of the earth—these people have changed the world.

  It’s not that air travelers are particularly high-minded. It’s simply that all our little acts of international trust and friendship add up. Barbara Cassani, who ran BA’s short-lived budget airline Go, understood this: “We change the way people live their lives,” she once said. “I joke that I’m waiting for my Nobel Peace Prize for services to humanity.”

  When people buy second homes over the border and commute by air, or use low-cost carriers to make regular visits to their girlfriends or boyfriends abroad, we all come to understand each other better. In France, dying rural communities have been revived by blow-ins from Britain. This was once a cause for anxiety—until the houses got rebuilt, the roads were repaired, and the schools reopened. Ryanair and easyJet have bound war-weary Europe together more effectively than any number of postwar treaties, and their expansion into Eastern Europe can only improve the continent’s political fortunes.

  Today, every major city in the world needs an airport if it wants to develop and expand. Many nation-states depend upon the traveler’s dollar. International tourist receipts are now about $944 billion a year—or more than $1 trillion if you add in the cost of the air tickets.

  For even the wealthiest and most developed nation, operating a safe, efficient civil airline is a gigantic undertaking. From the planes, airports, and maintenance crews to the ground transport links and air-traffic-control systems, the list of necessary investments and expenses is unending. The consequences for poor nations aren’t good.

  For a start, they’ll be having to operate old planes. They’ll be cheap to buy and inherently reliable, with all the kinks ironed out of them. But they’ll cost money to maintain, and they’ll consume a lot of fuel. This puts the airline of a poor country at an immediate commercial disadvantage. There’s also a human cost: skimping on expensive maintenance will bring tried and trusted older aircraft toppling out of the sky. The air-safety record across parts of Africa is frankly atrocious. Planes crash quite regularly, particularly in Sudan and Nigeria.

  More serious still, suppose you want to improve your air services. For that, you will need outside investment. The levels of investment required are so great they can trigger all manner of political crises, as we discovered when we created Virgin Nigeria. How to “Africanize” African air services and make them truly serve and support their local economies is a problem no one yet knows how to solve. The creation of a truly global air industry, operated by all and for all, is still a long way off.

  What of Juan Terry Trippe’s vision of a vast airline monopoly, operating everywhere for the good of the whole world? Well, the world thought otherwise. Other airlines learned the knack of flying across oceans. Unimpressed by Trippe’s offer to turn his company into a 49 percent state-owned monopoly, in 1950 the U.S. Congress refused Pan Am permission to run domestic flights.

  From being the chosen instrument of U.S. foreign policy, with a monopoly on U.S. traffic abroad, Pan Am became just another airline. It fought for its turf. It did some work for NASA. It made some mistakes. It let its accountants rub away at its glamour and allowed its quality to drop. Then, in 1989, it suffered a terrible tragedy, not of its own making, over Lockerbie, Scotland. It filed for bankruptcy early in 1991.

  seven

  Fanning the Flames

  Born in Bucharest in 1886, Henri Coandă grew up to be one of the more revolutionary engineers of his day. In 1905, he built a missile-airplane for the Romanian army. Five years later, he designed, built, and piloted the first jet-powered aircraft, and used it to wow the crowds at the second International Aeronautic Salon in Paris.

  Thirty-six years later, a Gloster E.28/39 airframe took to the skies, driven by an engine designed by a British Royal Air Force officer called Frank Whittle. It, too, was the world’s first jet-powered airplane.

  Frank Whittle invented the jet engine as we know it today. What makes the story slightly confusing is that there are many kinds of jet engines, and many engineers worked, quite independently, on the same ideas. Henri Coandă’s motorjet engine deserves its place in aviation history, as does Hans von Ohain’s turbojet engine, begun in 1934. Five years later, installed in a small, metal-fuselaged monoplane, it became the world’s first practical jet.

  Ohain combined original work with insights gleaned from reading papers by Whittle (which is why we celebrate Whittle rather than Ohain). But Ohain was a talent in his own right, and it’s a lasting mystery why Germany’s Nazi administration sidelined his work, preferring to deal with big manufacturers. (Ohain was recruited by the Americans after the war and got to meet Frank Whittle. They became good friends.)

  Henri Coandă’s missile-airplane for the Romanian army: was this the first jet?

  So what’s a jet engine? It’s simply anything that emits a jet of fluid out of one end, generating an equal and opposite force going in the other direction. An early Disney animation on space travel charmingly demonstrates this principle by means of a sneezing dog. As the dog sneezes in one direction, his rear end skids (across very scientific-looking graph paper) in the other.

  Rockets work by igniting fuel and jetting it out through a nozzle. The problem with rockets is that they have to carry all their fuel with them, and all the oxygen in which to burn it. Have a look at some Apollo footage: shortly before it blasts off, you can see dribbles of liquid oxygen evaporating in puffs of white cloud from the frame of the colossal 3,000-ton Saturn V rocket that carried men to the moon.

  A jet engine compresses the air around it and uses this compressed air to burn its fuel. Coandă’s motorjet used a regular combustion engine to drive its propeller; but some of the energy from the motor also worked to compress the air flowing into the engine. This compressed air was then mixed with fuel in a combustion chamber and ignited, producing an exhaust jet that helped drive the plane forward. Even as early as 1905, engineers understood the importance of Coandă’s new kind of propulsion system. Propellors and the piston engines that drove them were getting better and better—but the higher planes went, the thinner the air, and the less efficient propellers became. There was a second, bigger problem: once the tip of a propeller travels fast en
ough to break the sound barrier, it starts to lose efficiency. So even if they flew at low altitudes, propeller engines would be able to propel an airplane only so fast. Aviation designers knew that they were going to hit a speed barrier; Coandă showed them the way past it.

  The turbojets created by Whittle and Ohain took Coandă’s idea a step further. Rather than use an engine to compress the air in the combustion chamber, they use a spinning fan—basically a glorified propeller. The fan compresses the air entering the engine. Fuel is mixed with the compressed air and ignited. The exhaust jets out the back, and some of the energy released is used to drive the fan. The faster the fan spins, the more energy the engine produces, and the faster the fan spins. Were friction, noise, and heat not sucking energy out of the system, once a turbojet got going it would simply operate faster and faster until it exploded!

  The turbojet has spawned a dizzying number of variations. A turboprop engine uses as much of the engine’s energy as possible to drive a propeller. It’s tremendously efficient at low speeds, which is why really big military transports still boast propellers, giving them a rather old-fashioned look. A turbofan is a turboprop engine with a cowling around the propeller. The propeller ducts air around the engine, compressing it. This compressed air then gets mixed with the engine exhaust, which improves the flow of the exhaust, reducing turbulence and improving the efficiency of the engine. It also makes the engine quieter: the engines in commercial jet planes are usually turbofans.

  It all sounds rather complicated and difficult to do. And it is. There’s a reason Frank Whittle had two nervous breakdowns while working on the thing.

  Born in 1907, Whittle was a lousy student at school, but he used his own time well, reading every science book he could lay his hands on. He first applied to become an apprentice in the RAF in 1922, but, being only five feet tall, he was turned down by the doctors. A friendly PT instructor drew him aside and suggested exercises he could do to pass the medical board; six months later, and three inches taller, he entered the RAF College at Cranwell.