Word: boac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wrestled BOAC, Britain's state-owned airline, out of its postwar tail spin stepped away from the controls last week with a blast at "irksome political interference." After turning a 1948 loss of $30 million into a 1954 profit of $4,000,000, Sir Miles Thomas, 59, quit as BOAC chairman and chief executive...
...Miles had fought bureaucratic red tape and Britain's planemakers throughout his eight years at BOAC. He stirred up storms by pruning BOAC's staff from 24,000 to 18,000. And he galled Britons by replacing British planes with U.S. Boeing Stratocruisers and Lockheed Constellations. Recently, he ordered Douglas DC-7Cs as substitutes for de Havilland's ill-fated Comet jet liner. Said Sir Miles last week: "I was tired of being the whipping boy of some politicians. You can either have a competitive airline using the best available equipment, or you can have a shopwindow...
Last week, as the applause over the Comet showed, many were still playing what BOAC's Sir Miles himself once condemned as "the merry game of brochure-manship"-covering up basic deficiencies with torrents of pressagentry and hopeful prediction. Despite its good flight, the Comet III is but a prototype of a prototype that is to fly sometime in 1958, will be both slower, smaller and shorter in range than Douglas' DC-8 or Boeing's 707 jet transports...
...BOAC hopes to put the Bristol Britannia, a four-engined turboprop, in service across the Atlantic by 1957, fly the ocean nonstop at 400 m.p.h...
...doing everything possible to make the new planes a success. In the House of Commons, Transport and Civil Aviation Minister John Boyd-Carpenter announced that government-owned British Overseas Airways would honor its order for twelve Comet II's and five Comet Ill's, added that BOAC might even up its order with three more Comets. The Royal Air Force will also lend a helping hand by taking the remaining five Comet I's off BOAC's hands, use them for research and development...