Qantas

The company was the idea of two returned airmen and a grazier. Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh had flown with the Australian Flying Corps in Palestine; in 1919 they were sent to survey a landing-ground route across northern Australia for the England-to-Australia air race, and drove the distance in a Model T because no aircraft could be spared. What they saw on that drive was the argument for the airline: a country where a doctor, a letter or a stock agent could be a fortnight away by horse and buggy, and an afternoon away by air. Fergus McMaster, a Queensland grazier they met when his car broke down at a creek crossing, found the money.

Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited was registered in Brisbane on 16 November 1920, with its first registered office at Winton. Its capital was a few thousand pounds, its fleet an Avro 504K and a B.E.2e, and its first business was joy-riding and charter work around the western Queensland graziers who had subscribed the shares. Arthur Baird, the engineer who had maintained Fysh's aircraft in the war, joined as the fourth of the founding group and stayed for thirty years; the airline's early reputation for maintenance is largely his.

In 1921 the base moved to Longreach, which had a railhead, and on 2 November 1922 the company flew the service it had been formed to fly: a subsidised air mail between Charleville and Cloncurry, 501 nm of it, in an Armstrong Whitworth F.K.8. Passenger ticket number one went to Alexander Kennedy, an 84-year-old pastoralist and shareholder who had insisted on it as a condition of investing, and who flew the Longreach to Cloncurry leg sitting in the open front cockpit.

For most of the 1920s that was the whole airline: one route, a government mail contract, and a fare list on which a seat cost about as much as a good horse. It was also, from the start, an airline with no competitor and no alternative: in the country it served there were no roads worth the name, and the mail it carried was the only mail there was.

The Empire route died in stages. Qantas flying boats were impressed for evacuation and supply work as the Japanese advanced through the Netherlands East Indies, and two of them were lost with most of the people aboard: Corio was shot down by Japanese fighters off Timor on 30 January 1942, killing thirteen of the eighteen on board, and Circe disappeared a month later while evacuating civilians from Java, with twenty aboard. In February 1942 Singapore fell, and with it the only link between Australia and Britain.

What replaced it was the most remarkable service the airline ever flew. From 29 June 1943 Qantas operated Consolidated Catalina flying boats non-stop from the Swan River in Western Australia to Koggala in Ceylon: 3,000–3,100 nm of open Indian Ocean, in radio silence, taking between 27 and 33 hours. Passengers (never more than three, alongside diplomatic mail) crossed a night and saw the sun rise twice, and were given a certificate of membership of "the Rare and Secret Order of the Double Sunrise". The crews navigated by sextant. The route was flown 271 times without loss.

From 1944 the Catalinas were supplemented and then replaced by converted Liberators flying a faster Perth to Ceylon route with a refuelling stop at Learmonth, and it was on this service that the airline's emblem appeared: a kangaroo inside a winged circle, the mark of the "Kangaroo Service". It was drawn by the Australian designer Gert Sellheim, and it has been on the tail of the airline's aircraft in one form or another ever since.

The war left Qantas with long-range crews, ocean navigation experience and a claim on the Australia to Britain route that no other Australian company could match. It also left it without a business model: its pre-war partner, Imperial Airways, had become the state-owned BOAC, and the Australian government had begun to think about airlines the same way.

Britain wanted an air route to Australia, and Imperial Airways could not fly the last leg of it alone. On 18 January 1934 Qantas and Imperial Airways each took half of a new company, Qantas Empire Airways Limited, formed to operate the Australian end of the England to Australia service. Fysh ran it. In December 1934 the first through service left Brisbane for Singapore, where Imperial Airways took the mail on to London; the journey took twelve days and the aircraft was a de Havilland DH.86 four-engined biplane.

The partnership moved the airline from Longreach to Brisbane and then to Sydney, from mail contracts measured in hundreds of miles to a route measured in continents, and from bush operations to something recognisably an international airline. It also moved it onto the water. From July 1938 the Empire route was flown by Short S.23 flying boats (Qantas took six, with names like Cooee and Coolangatta) operating from Rose Bay on Sydney Harbour through Singapore to Southampton, the whole way in British hands for the first time.

The flying boat service was the most comfortable travelling Qantas had ever sold and, in its way, the least efficient: fifteen passengers, nine or ten days, thirty-odd stops, and a night spent ashore at each. It was also profoundly vulnerable, as the next four years proved. The aircraft were unarmed, they were slow, they landed on open water at published times, and the route ran through the exact latitudes the Japanese advance would take.

By 1939 Qantas Empire Airways was carrying mail and passengers between Australia and Britain on a schedule, and had become, without ever being told so, an instrument of imperial communication. When that communication was cut, the airline was handed the job of restoring it.

In 1947 the Australian government bought Qantas Empire Airways outright (first the British half from BOAC, then the Australian shareholding) and the airline became a wholly state-owned company. The domestic network went to the government's other airline, Trans Australia Airlines, and Qantas was given the international routes and told to fly them. For the next forty-eight years it was an instrument of national policy as much as a business, and its route map was argued over in Canberra.

It began flying the routes almost at once. On 1 December 1947 a Lockheed Constellation left Sydney for London by way of Darwin, Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo and Tripoli: four days, and the service was named the Kangaroo Route, a name it still carries. Flying boats continued alongside it for a few more years on the Pacific and the New Guinea services, and the last Qantas Catalinas were retired at the end of the 1940s.

The Constellation, and from 1954 the Super Constellation, gave the airline its first genuinely competitive long-haul aircraft, and it used them to draw a map that no European carrier had reason to draw: Sydney to Johannesburg across the southern Indian Ocean from 1952, Sydney to Vancouver by way of Fiji and Honolulu, and from 14 January 1958 a round-the-world service operated jointly with BOAC, Qantas flying one direction through Asia and the other through the Americas, the first airline in the world to offer it.

Being state-owned settled the airline's ambitions in a particular direction. It had no domestic business to defend and no shareholders to satisfy, and its job, as the government understood it, was to connect a country on the far side of the world to the places its people came from and traded with. That is still, recognisably, the shape of the network.

What turned a mail contract into an aircraft company was the decision to build its own aeroplanes. Imported machines were slow to arrive and slower to repair, so from 1926 Qantas assembled de Havilland DH.50s under licence in its hangar at Longreach, and went on to build seven of them, along with a single aircraft of its own design, the DH.50-derived Qantas biplane of 1929. The hangar still stands; it is heritage-listed, and the airline is one of very few in the world that can point to a shed in which it manufactured its own fleet.

The DH.50 had an enclosed cabin, which mattered more in western Queensland than it sounds. It made possible the second thing that shaped the airline's early character: medical flying. On 17 May 1928 a Qantas DH.50 named Victory, flown by Arthur Affleck with Dr Kenyon St Vincent Welch aboard, left Cloncurry on the first flight of the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service: the organisation that became the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Qantas supplied the aircraft, the pilots and the maintenance for its first years, and did so on a route network built for mail.

The route map grew slowly and along the same logic: Charleville to Brisbane in 1929, which finally joined the outback service to a capital city, and a spread of feeder lines through Queensland and into the Northern Territory. Fares remained high, aircraft remained small, and the company remained, by any measure a European or American carrier would have recognised, tiny.

Its importance was not in its size. By 1930 Qantas had ten years of continuous operation over terrain with no diversions, no weather reporting and no rescue, and a staff that had learned to keep aircraft flying a thousand miles from a spare part. That was the qualification it brought to the negotiation that changed it.

Qantas ordered the Boeing 707 in 1956 and put it into service on 29 July 1959, on the Pacific route from Sydney to San Francisco. It was the first airline outside the United States to fly the type, ahead of BOAC and Air France, and it flew a version built for nobody else: the 707-138, shortened by ten feet against the standard aircraft to trade capacity for the range the Pacific demanded. The Constellations were gone from the main routes within four years.

The jets did to the Kangaroo Route what the Constellation had done to the flying boat. London came within thirty-odd hours and then under thirty, the stops fell from seven to four, and the fare fell far enough that the traffic changed character: through the 1960s Qantas carried migrants, students and the first generation of Australians for whom a trip to Europe was a plan rather than an emigration. The company was renamed Qantas Airways Limited in 1967, dropping "Empire" from a title that had outlasted the thing.

The Boeing 747 arrived in September 1971 and suited the airline better than it suited almost anyone else. Australia's problem had always been distance and thin traffic; the 747 answered the first and the country's post-war growth answered the second. Qantas took the type further than any other operator: by 1979 it was flying nothing else, the only all-747 airline in the world, and it went on to buy almost every major variant through to the 747-400.

The most complete demonstration came on 17 August 1989, when the brand-new 747-438 VH-OJA City of Canberra flew London Heathrow to Sydney non-stop on its delivery flight: 9,719.5 nm in 20 hours and 9 minutes, a distance record for a commercial airliner. It carried no revenue passengers and a minimum of fuel reserves, and it made a point the airline had been making since 1943: that the interesting problem in Australian aviation is the one leg nobody else has to fly.

The arrangement that had kept Qantas international and TAA domestic lasted until Australian aviation was deregulated at the end of the 1980s. In September 1992 Qantas absorbed Australian Airlines (the renamed TAA, and its state-owned sibling for forty-five years) and became for the first time since 1947 an airline that flew within Australia as well as out of it. The two networks were merged under one brand, and the domestic operation has been roughly half the airline's passengers ever since.

Privatisation followed in two steps. In March 1993 British Airways bought 25 per cent of the company for A$665 million, a strategic stake that tied the Kangaroo Route to Heathrow and lasted until 2004. The remainder was floated on the Australian Securities Exchange in July 1995, completing the sale and ending forty-eight years of government ownership. Foreign ownership of the airline remains capped by the Qantas Sale Act that accompanied it.

On 1 February 1999 Qantas began operating as a founding member of oneworld, alongside American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Canadian Airlines: the second of the three global alliances to start flying, and the one that gave the airline reciprocal reach into North America and Europe without buying aircraft to get there.

The decade that followed set the group's present shape. Jetstar was launched in May 2004 as a separate low-fare airline with its own aircraft, crews and costs, initially to meet Virgin Blue in the domestic market and later to take on the long-haul leisure routes the mainline could not fly profitably. The strategy of running two airlines at two cost bases under one group, unusual when Qantas adopted it, is now the thing the company is most often studied for.

Qantas is older than the country's federal capital was when it opened, older than commercial aviation in most of the world, and older than every airline still trading under its original name except KLM. It has been a bush mail service, a manufacturer, an ambulance operator, an instrument of empire, a wartime lifeline, a state enterprise and a listed company, and it has done all of it from the furthest point from the world's air routes that a large economy occupies.

What it built out of that position is a specific competence: flying further than anyone needs to. The Double Sunrise crossings of 1943, the 707-138 shortened for the Pacific, the all-747 fleet, the record delivery flight of 1989, Perth to London and the Project Sunrise A350s are the same problem solved six times with the equipment of six different eras.

The physical record survives at Longreach, where the Qantas Founders Museum stands on the airfield the company flew from in the 1920s, keeping the heritage-listed hangar in which it built its own DH.50s along with the first Qantas 707 and a 747-200. At Winton, five hours further west, a memorial marks the town where the company was registered in November 1920. Both are a long way from an international airport, which is exactly the point.