• Virgin Atlantic Airlines

Virgin Atlantic began with an idea dreamed up by Anglo-US lawyer, Randolph Fields, to fill the transatlantic low-fare market gap left by the recently demised Laker Airways. Fields had already formed British Atlantic Airways in June 1982 and by December 1983 the British Civil Aviation Aurthority signalled its approval for a scheduled service between London-Gatwick and Newark, contingent upon £3m being secured to finance the new airline. Early in the 1984 Fields approached Virgin Records boss Richard Branson who quickly agreed to back the venture, resulting in the creation of Virgin Atlantic Airways in March 1984. After three months of frantic activity, Virgin’s leased Boeing 747, G-VGIN, took to the skies on 22 June 1984 carrying invited guests and members of the press on the inaugural service to New York.

From the outset, Virgin adopted a totally new marketing approach, aimed initially at the young budget-conscious traveller, offering fares at just £99 and innovative on-board entertainment, such as live musicians and novelty acts. Coupled with a high-profile publicity campaign linked to the established record business, this proved to be an immediate hit with the target audience. Less than a year after Virgin’s launch, Randolph Fields sold his holding in May 1985 for £1m plus a lifetime free ticket, presumably to help fund his next airline project, Highland Express, which after many false starts finally got off the ground at the end of June 1987. In October 1985 Virgin Cargo, Virgin Holidays (UK) and Virgin Vacations (USA) were established, followed a month later by granting of a second route licence for Gatwick to Miami. With the addition of a second B747, the Miami service commenced in April 1986 and by June the frequency had increased to four times weekly. Taking the Virgin name into Europe in 1986 British Air Ferries was contracted to operate a daily service between Gatwick and Maastricht to feed traffic from the Low Countries into its long-haul network.

Although at this stage essentially a low-fare airline, Virgin did not want to lose out on premium fare traffic. Having already converted the more conventional upper deck lounge into ‘Upper Class’ with first-class sleeper seats, the airline set about wooing the young, trendy breed of businessman with bonus goodies such as free limousine/helicopter transfers to New York city and individual ‘Walkman’ TV sets in its business section. These moves proved popular and within two years business class accommodation had been increased from 14 to 46 seats. Confirmation of Virgin Atlantic’s strategy came in September 1987 with the uplift of its millionth transatlantic passenger, contributing to profits in excess of £2m – a remarkable achievement for an airline with only two aircraft. Towards the end of 1988 the fleet size was doubled to service new route awards for charter flights to Orlando, Florida and a scheduled service to JFK, where a dedicated cargo terminal was established in October 1989. The opening of a three times weekly service to Tokyo in May 1989, followed by Los Angeles a year later and Boston in May 1991, saw fleet numbers rise to eight aircraft.

Ever since its inception, Virgin Atlantic had battled with the Civil Aviation Authority and established airlines at Heathrow for rights to operate from London’s premier airport. This ambition was finally achieved in July 1991 with the launch of services from Heathrow to JFK, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Hitherto, the newly-privatised British Airways had largely ignored any competition from Virgin, but the move on to its home turf brought a swift reaction. The result was a long-running and often vitriolic media campaign, accompanied by alleged dirty tricks tactics to discredit Virgin and poach its passenger traffic. Taking Sir Freddie Laker’s advice to sue, culminated in a successful personal libel action by Richard Branson against British Airway’s chief, Lord King, which together with other outstanding contractual engineering issues was finally settled out of court in January 1993 for a total of £7.85m, though in the longer term an anti-trust action in the US courts was to prove indeterminate. Branson’s often outrageous publicity stunts had not done much to endear him to his adversary; on one occasion his team vandalised British Airway’s prestigious Concorde model adorning the entrance to Heathrow by temporarily transforming its colour scheme into that of Virgin Atlantic.

This protracted battle with British Airways had placed a severe burden on the airline’s finances, leading to Branson’s decision to sell off his giant Virgin record empire to EMI Industries in March 1992. This sale realised some £500m and allowed the repurchase of a 10% stake in Virgin Traveller, the airline’s parent company, held since 1989 by the Japanese Seibu Saisu Corporation. Having divested itself of reliance on British Airways for engineering, Virgin set about creating its own maintenance division, as well as making significant improvements to its customer services. It became the first airline to install child safety seats and to provide trained staff and equipment for in-flight cardiac arrest incidents. In May 1992 it introduced ‘mid class’ (later ‘premium class’), a full-fare super economy service and later such innovations as a ‘snooze zone’ for upper-deck clients, individual TV sets for all passengers and for its more adventurous customers, ‘Virgin Taxijet’, a rapid transit motorcycle service between selected airports and city centres.

Now unhampered by financial constraints, Virgin was able to turn its attention to fleet expansion and upgrade with an order for four new Airbus A340s in April 1993, the first of which was delivered the following December. In the meantime, the Orlando service had been transformed into a scheduled operation and over the next two years, marketing and code-share alliances were concluded with Ansett, British Midland, Continental, Delta and Malaysian. The scope of long-haul operations was enhanced with the addition of Boeing 747-400 aircraft early in 1994 and over the next two years, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Washington and Johannesburg were, in turn, added to the network map.

Towards the end of 1997, Virgin became the launch customer for the extended range A340-600 with an order for eight aircraft plus eight options. Further improvements in passenger facilities saw the launch of drive-through check-in facilities for upper class passengers at Gatwick, New York and San Francisco and upgrading of on-board medical facilities with a dedicated Medilink satellite telemedicine service. A second daily Los Angeles service was commenced in August 1997 and towards the end of the following year new Caribbean routes were opened to Antigua, Barbados and St Lucia. During December 1999 Singapore Airlines paid over £600m for a 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic, by which time the airline had a fleet of 29 aircraft carrying around three million passengers annually, helping towards a group turnover in the region of £800m.

Virgin entered the holiday charter market mid-way through 1999 with the launch of Virgin Sun, offering flights to 13 Mediterranean destinations from both Gatwick and Manchester. New long-distance destinations were Shanghai from 12 July, Chicago from 1 November and Cape Town from 2 December 1999. This major route expansion programme continued in 2000 with the commencement of services to Las Vegas and Delhi, the latter code-shared with Air India. Ongoing innovative improvements and revamps to passenger facilities included an extension of the drive-through check-in scheme to many major destinations, while upgrades to onboard facilities in all classes included enhanced upper class sleeper seats and double beds, in-flight beauty therapists, medical equipment and from 2000, the addition of ‘Earth Calling’ satellite mobile phone and SMS messaging service. All of this contributed towards Virgin gaining the prestigious Official Airline Guide’s ‘Airline of the Year’ accolade. Virgin also made inroads into the Australian market with an investment of $A10m to launch its Virgin Blue low-cost carrier in September 2000. Again the venture proved successful, for 18 months later Branson sold 50% of the company the Patrick Corporation for $A260m.

With an eye on future growth, in February 2001 Virgin became launch customer for the 500-seat A380 airliner with an order worth $3.8bn for four aircraft with eight options, due for delivery in 2014. Despite the opening of new routes to Toronto and Lagos in June and July 2001, Virgin Atlantic was not immune from the global impact of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the USA. This resulted in a 20% cut in capacity and the withdrawal of services to Athens, Chicago and Toronto, as well as a £90m pre-tax loss for the financial year 2001-2. However, the airline soon bounced back by offering £98 incentive tickets through a marketing tie-up with the Daily Express newspaper, followed by the announcement of frequency increases in February 2002. In a move designed to recover lost transatlantic traffic, Virgin introduced its new Airbus A340-600 on services to New York in August and a year later confirmed an order for a further 13 aircraft with an equal number of options, valued at $5.5bn. Resuming its route expansion programme, Virgin began serving Port Harcourt in Nigeria twice weekly from Gatwick in February 2003, Grenada and Tobago in May, followed by an extension from Hong Kong to Sydney from December.

In June 2005, the airline celebrated its 21^st birthday with a special flight to New York, carrying Sir Richard Branson, together with celebrities and a press party. A further wave of network enlargement saw Mumbai, Havana and Nassau all coming online during 2005, as was Manchester as a second UK departure point for Caribbean destinations. Spreading the Virgin airline empire ever further, after overcoming many political and legal hurdles, Virgin America finally got underway at the beginning of August 2007, while Virgin Nigeria had already taken off in September 2005, initially with domestic services linking Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt. In 2007 Virgin Atlantic flew 5.1 million passengers to 28 destinations worldwide with a fleet of 38 A340 and B747s, earning £46.8m pre-tax profit. Virgin Atlantic announced in March 2007 that it has ordered 15 of the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners for $8bn – with options on ordering another eight 787-9s and purchase rights on a further 20 aircraft.

Though on the surface somewhat reticent, billionaire Sir Richard Branson has never been one to shun a publicity opportunity to further the aims of his global Virgin conglomerate, now encompassing around 39 separate companies and brands with annual revenues exceeding £10bn. Starting with the 1985-6 Virgin Atlantic Challenger attempts to break the Blue Riband Transatlantic surface crossing record, Branson went on to participate in several aerial adventures both across the Atlantic and the Pacific, in company with balloonist Per Lindstrand and long-distance pilot, yachtsman and navigator, Steve Fossett. In February 2005 Fosset, sponsored by Virgin, completed a successful non-stop global circumnavigation by air in Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a revolutionary composite aircraft from the stable of designer, Bert Rutan.

Remaining at the forefront of transportation and leisure innovation, Branson teamed up with Rutan and SpaceShipOne to create Virgin Galactic, which planned to offer sub-orbital space-travel and in July 2010 its revolutionary low-earth orbit vehicle, VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise, made its first manned flight from the Mojave Desert. In yet another first on 24 February 2008 a Virgin B747, flying between London and Amsterdam, became the first aircraft to operate over any significant distance using a 20% mixture of biofuel, derived from coconut and palm oil. Completing the global network Virgin’s new brand, V Australia, launched on 27 February 2009, after a delay due to the strike at Boeing, with a flight between Sydney and Los Angeles, flown by its brand-new B777 VH-VOZ, named Didgeree Blue.

In June 2009 Virgin announced an order for ten Airbus A330-200s for delivery from 2011. By then the airline was operating a fleet of 38 aircraft, carrying around 5.5 million passengers annually to 29 international capitals and leisure destinations from three UK airports. In March 2013 Virgin began domestic services from Heathrow using leased Airbus A320s under the name Little Red and announced an alliance with US carrier Delta Air Lines for transatlantic services from January 2014.

During the next two years the Little Red domestic airline suffered heavy losses and Little Red services between London and Manchester were ended in March 2015 and the Scottish routes in September 2015. Substantial financial losses also led to the cutting of hundreds of jobs to improve management efficiency. Later, in 2017, an abortive attempt was made by Air France-KLM to acquire a 31% stake in Virgin Atlantic for £220m. However, by autumn 2019 Virgin Atlantic was outlining plans for expansion, including the acquisition of Flybe which would be rebranded as Virgin Connect. However, Flybe filed for administration and ceased operations in March 2020 and the takeover never happened.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2019 the airline also stopped flying to Dubai, a major aviation and tourism hub, and demand fell causing huge problems for the aviation sector.

Virgin Atlantic announced over 3,000 jobs losses in the UK and an imminent end to operations at Gatwick airport. On 4 August 2020 Virgin Atlantic filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors in the US as part of a recapitalisation and debt restructuring plan and soon a £1.2bn rescue and debt restructuring package was approved. This was followed by substantial further job cuts. In 2023 Virgin Atlantic joined the SkyTeam airline alliance and at the end of the year resumed flights to Dubai and operated an experimental Boeing 787-9 flight between London Heathrow and New York City using 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel.