Air France

France entered the 1930s with too many airlines and not enough traffic. Five companies were named in the merger (Air Orient, Air Union, the CIDNA, the Farman company and Aéropostale) each subsidised, each losing money, and by 1933 the government had lost patience with paying five times for one network. The genealogy below traces the three decades of mergers, syndicates and colonial subsidiaries that produced them, and the further consolidation of 1941 that followed.

The merged company was constituted on 30 August 1933 and took a name proposed by a journalist, Georges Raffalovitch. Air France began flying on 7 October from Le Bourget, with a fleet of a few dozen aircraft of a dozen types and a route map that was really an inventory of French foreign policy: the Mediterranean, North and West Africa, the Levant, Indochina, South America. From Air Orient it took the emblem: a winged seahorse, drawn for the Indochina line, which the staff would come to call *la crevette*, the shrimp, and which the company has never replaced.

The pre-war fleet was mostly French and mostly slow. The Potez 62, a high-wing twin with a wooden fuselage carrying fourteen to sixteen passengers in two compartments, cruised at around 150 kt and was the workhorse of the European and colonial lines. The network was extended rather than modernised, and the routes east took days. Then came the war: the company moved what it could to Casablanca, and what remained in France was requisitioned, dispersed or destroyed.

On 26 June 1945 the whole of French air transport was nationalised, and a decree that December handed Air France the management of the national network. The company was reconstituted as Société Nationale Air France on 1 January 1946, and three years of extraordinary reconstruction followed. It opened a city terminal at Les Invalides, in the middle of Paris, with coaches out to Le Bourget. It hired its first female flight attendants in 1946. On 1 July of that year it began flying Paris to New York with Douglas DC-4s, stopping at Shannon and Gander, in a little under twenty hours.

The statute that governed the airline for the next half-century came on 16 June 1948, when an act of parliament created the Compagnie Nationale Air France with the state holding seventy per cent of the capital: a share that would in practice grow to very nearly all of it. Max Hymans was appointed president that August and stayed thirteen years; the modernisation of the fleet, and eventually the decision to buy jets, belong to him.

By 1948 the airline was flying about 130 aircraft, one of the largest fleets in the world, and claiming the longest network. From 1947 the Lockheed Constellation and then the Super Constellation carried the long-haul routes, pressurised, four-engined, triple-finned, and fast enough to make North America a single overnight rather than an expedition. They served until 1965, by which time the aircraft beside them on the apron were jets.

Air France reached the jet age early and by accident of nerve: in August 1953 it put the de Havilland Comet 1A on Paris to Rome to Beirut, months before the type was grounded worldwide. The operations and engineering base had moved to the new Orly South terminal in 1952, and the airline spent the rest of the decade waiting for jets that worked.

They came from Toulouse. The Sud Aviation Caravelle (twin-engined, engines mounted at the tail so the wing stayed clean, five seats abreast) was ordered by Air France in 1956 and entered revenue service in 1959, on Paris to Rome to Athens to Istanbul. The airline named each aircraft after a French province: *Alsace*, *Lorraine*, *Touraine*, *Picardie*. The Caravelle was quiet where the first jets were loud and comfortable where they were cramped, it sold to airlines on every continent, and it settled the question of whether France could build and export a modern airliner. The Boeing 707 arrived in parallel for the long-haul routes, and continuous jet operation dates from 1960.

The same years brought the least aeronautical part of the story. French governments spent the 1960s dividing the world between their airlines by decree: the domestic network went to Air Inter in 1960, and from 1963 whole regions (West and southern Africa, Australia, the Pacific, much of south-east Asia) were transferred to the private UTA. Air France grew inside the space it was allotted, and when the policy was relaxed in 1986 it found itself competing on its own routes with a rival the state had built.

In 1974 the airline began moving to the new Charles de Gaulle airport at Roissy, north of Paris, and became the first operator of the Airbus A300, the twin-engined widebody that started Airbus. The Boeing 747 had arrived in 1970 and would eventually give Air France one of the largest jumbo fleets in the world: thirty-three of them by the airline's fiftieth anniversary in 1983, when it flew about a hundred jets to 150 destinations in 73 countries with more than 34,000 staff.

On 21 January 1976, at the same hour as a British Airways Concorde left London for Bahrain, Air France's F-BVFA lifted off from Charles de Gaulle for Rio de Janeiro by way of Dakar. Supersonic scheduled service had begun, and only two airlines in the history of aviation would ever operate it.

The route that mattered was the North Atlantic, and it took American permission. Washington Dulles came on 24 May 1976; New York, held up by noise objections, on 22 November 1977. Paris to New York took about three hours and twenty minutes at twice the speed of sound, against seven or eight for a subsonic aircraft: the one product in commercial aviation that could not be matched at any price. Air France flew seven Concordes, ran services to Mexico City by way of Washington, and chartered the aircraft widely; the fleet never made the economic case its designers had promised, and both operators effectively flew it as a prestige service with a small, loyal and very rich clientele.

It ended in two stages. On 25 July 2000 the Concorde operating flight AF4590 ran over a strip of metal on the runway at Charles de Gaulle, burst a tyre, ruptured a fuel tank and crashed into a hotel at Gonesse two minutes after take-off, killing all 109 people aboard and four on the ground. The type was grounded, modified (Kevlar-lined tanks, burst-resistant tyres) and returned to service in 2001 into a transatlantic market that had collapsed. Air France withdrew Concorde in late May 2003, British Airways that October, and the fastest airliners ever flown in commercial service went to museums, one of them at Le Bourget within sight of where Air France started.

The policy of dividing France between three airlines was undone in a single decision. On 12 January 1990 the operations of state-owned Air France, semi-public Air Inter and private UTA were merged into one enlarged company, on the reasoning that a European air transport market about to be liberalised would reward scale and punish a national carrier kept deliberately small. A holding company, Groupe Air France, followed in 1994; Air Inter Europe was absorbed outright in 1997; and the hub-and-spoke operation at Charles de Gaulle, banks of arrivals and departures timed to connect with each other, was built in those same years.

Privatisation came next, cautiously. The government approved a partial sale in February 1999 and the shares were listed in Paris on the 22nd. In June the airline signed a transatlantic partnership with Delta Air Lines, and on 22 June 2000 that partnership became SkyTeam, founded with Delta, Aeroméxico and Korean Air and now one of the three global alliances.

The decisive move was the merger with KLM, announced on 30 September 2003 and completed on 5 May 2004. The structure was novel and has held: one listed holding company, Air France to KLM, owning two airlines that kept their names, their national identities, their hubs and their crews while sharing network planning, fleet strategy, maintenance and sales. Former Air France shareholders held 81 per cent of the new group at the outset, and the French state's stake fell from 54.4 per cent of the old company to 44 per cent of the new one and then, through later sales, to well under a quarter, enough to make the merger, in effect, the privatisation. The state remains the group's largest shareholder.

Air France to KLM was for a time the largest airline group in the world by operating revenue. In 2025 it carried 102.8 million passengers across all its airlines and reported record revenues of €33.0 billion; Air France's own share of that was 42.3 million passengers. The group is run by Benjamin Smith; Air France has been led since December 2018 by Anne Rigail.

Air France occupies a place in France that no other company quite holds. It was assembled by the state, owned by the state for half a century, and used deliberately as an instrument of French presence overseas: in Africa, in the Levant, in the Caribbean and the Pacific, on routes that carried administration and settlement as much as tourism. Its posters were commissioned from designers of the rank of Jean Carlu; its uniforms from couture houses; its aircraft named after provinces and towns. The result is a brand read at home as public property rather than as a listed company, which is one reason a strike at Air France is national news and a fare rise is a political argument.

Its aeronautical legacy is more specific: it was the launch customer that made French and European aircraft credible. The Caravelle proved a French jet could be sold across the world, the A300 and later the A320 gave Airbus its first operators, and Concorde, flown in scheduled service by only two airlines ever, put the airline permanently in the history of what aviation attempted and then stopped attempting. That story is now told in museums; one of its Concordes sits at Le Bourget, a few kilometres from the aerodrome the company flew out of on its first day in 1933.

What survives of the original company is smaller and stranger than any of that. A shrimp, drawn for a line to Indochina in the 1920s, still flies on the nose of every aircraft it owns.