If you travel by air, you’re probably as annoyed as everybody else with the way airline travel has descended to the lowest levels of service, carry-on space, food, and other things. Airlines once provided much better and more inclusive service. On the other hand, you might appreciate the lower air fares you can often find now (at least compared with the cost of tickets years back). If you’re looking for somebody to blame or thank, possibly the best candidate is Freddy Laker, who was born August 6, 1922 and came up with the whole idea of “discount air travel.”
Laker was born in Kent, England, and his first job after school was at the Short Brothers airplane company. He was a pilot, and during WWII was part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, which ferried Royal Air Force aircraft from wherever they were to wherever they were needed. After the war he was a pilot for British European Airways and London Aero Motor Services, and around 1947 wanted to become a dealer in war-surplus airplanes. He only had about £4,500, which wasn’t nearly enough, so he borrowed an additional £38,000 from a wealthy friend (it’s good to have friends) and started his business.
His timing was excellent, because the very next year the USSR blockaded West Berlin, and NATO organized an airlift campaign to supply the city. All available aircraft were needed, and Laker and his company had all the business they could handle for more than a year. Laker flew many of the planes himself.
By 1954 we was a successful aviation entrepreneur, and founded a second company, the Channel Air Bridge. It was a simple idea — if you wanted to drive your car from England to France (or the reverse), you would just drive to the airport and Channel Air Bridge would ferry you and your car across the English Channel by plane. Although it seems like it would have been a niche market, the company was successful enough for him to sell it (along with two other aviation businesses) in 1958 to Airwork, which he also joined. Two years later, though, he left to become the managing director of British United Airways.
He stayed at British United Airways for five years, and somewhere in there had another idea — which he acted on in 1966 when he founded Laker Airways. It was originally a charter airline that operated two second-hand airplanes. But he introduced a new idea: discount air travel. Passengers could buy their tickets right at the airport (in fact they had to) on the day they were traveling. If they wanted anything to eat during the flight, they had to buy it separately. And if you had extra luggage, there was a fee for that too. There were no reserved seats; it was first-come first-served. But the tickets cost less than a third of what other airlines charged.
The discount airline idea, um, “took off” (sorry) and Laker began operating the service under in the name Sky Train in 1976. Sky Train was the model for all the discount airlines (and airline services) that came afterward. Laker Airways, which operated Sky Train, became the first European airline to purchase “jumbo jets” in 1972 when they introduced two DC-10s. And in 1977 they introduced the first low-fare regular service between London and New York.
Laker was knighted in 1977 in recognition of his “services to the airline industry,” and received an honorary degree from the University of Strathclyde in 1981 (Laker had never attended college). His ventures had made him quite wealthy, and after retiring he lived on Grand Bahama Island, where he had a waterfront mansion and a yacht, and Florida in the US, where he had another large home. By then he had married his fourth wife, who was a former airline stewardess. He died at 83 in a hospital from complications after cardiac surgery.
There have been three commercial airliners named after Freddie Laker (none owned by any of his airlines), and he was the subject of the 1982 musical Laker! In the 1984 film Top Secret! (another title with an exclamation mark), the villain Nigel announces that he became a villain after being exposed to “great thinkers like Karl Marx, Lenin, L.Ron Hubbard, and Freddie Laker.” Inside Flyer magazine introduced, in 1988, the Freddie Awards for excellence in frequent flyer programs. There’s a bar in the London Southend Airport named Laker’s Bar. and in 2015, Norwegian Air International put an image of Laker on the tail of one of their airliners. He’s one of the “British tail fin heroes” that include Freddie Mercury and Roald Dahl.
You can’t fly on Sky Train any more; they were forced into bankruptcy in 1982 by larger airlines undercutting their prices even to the point of losing money. The airlines lost antitrust lawsuits in court, and paid Laker nearly $100 million, but it was too late for the airline. At least one of the airlines, Qantas, subsequently raised ticket prices afterward on newly-exclusive routes to rates far higher then they had been before (it’s good to have a monopoly). Sky Train had also lost a percentage of passengers who didn’t want to fly on DC-10 airplanes after two of them crashed catastrophically in the late 1970s. But Freddie Laker’s idea of discount air travel with no frills definitely lives on.
