What is it about?
The article digs beneath Imperial Airways' own massaged data (passenger-miles) to reveal the actual numbers of people (50,000) who the airline transported on its long-haul routes beyond Europe. The article also breaks down the passenger traffic into its various geographies.
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Why is it important?
The paper helps to quantify precisely one aspect of the work and scale of Imperial Airways in servicing Britain's late colonial rule, commerce and tourism. The passenger statistics show that many people used the airline to travel short stages; historical narratives create the impression that most passengers flew either to or from London.
Perspectives
The work was one strand of a wider project to examine the role of civil aviation in Britain's late Empire. Finding and analysing actual passenger data helped to 'ground' the importance of the airline, and to cast more light onto the gap between the rhetoric and reality of imperial aviation.
Professor Gordon H Pirie
University of Cape Town
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Passenger Traffic in the 1930s on British Imperial Air Routes: Refinement and Revision, The Journal of Transport History, March 2004, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.7227/tjth.25.1.4.
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