How One Man Sold £59 Flights to New York — And Lost Everything: Freddie Laker

On the 4th of February 1982, Sir Freddie Laker was in New York filming a television commercial when his bankers in London called in his loans. He was given until five o'clock that afternoon to find five million pounds. The deadline was extended to eight the next morning. He couldn't find it, and in the early hours of the 5th of February the banks appointed a receiver. 2,600 people lost their jobs. Around 10,000 passengers were stranded, by the figure given in the House of Commons that same afternoon. Five years earlier, that airline had done something no British company had ever done. On the 26th of September 1977, Laker Airways began selling a one-way ticket from London to New York for £59. No advance booking. No reservation. No travel agent. You turned up at the airport, you queued, you paid at the desk, and you got on a 345-seat DC-10. An 18-year-old Californian bought the very first one. He'd been in the queue for 55 hours. This is the story of the scrapyard-keeper's son from Canterbury who made flying cheap — and of what happened next. It covers the Air Transport Auxiliary and the war-surplus aircraft trade; the Berlin Airlift; the Carvair, the aeroplane he had rebuilt with a nose that swung open so you could drive your car into the front of it; and the affinity-group rules that meant charter passengers were handed fake membership cards on the coach to the airport, because cheap flying wasn't illegal for being unsafe — it was illegal for being cheap. It covers the six years it took him to be allowed to sell a single Skytrain seat. The licence granted and revoked. The Secretary of State for Trade announcing in July 1975 that Skytrain "cannot be allowed to start" — because British Airways was forecast to lose about £3 million a year if it did. And Laker taking the British government to the Court of Appeal, and winning, in a judgment still cited in public law textbooks today. And it covers the fall honestly. The DC-10 grounding of 1979. Sterling going from $2.38 to $1.91 in a single year against dollar-denominated aircraft debt. Fuel tripling after the Iranian revolution. And Pan Am cutting its lowest transatlantic fares by up to two thirds in October 1981, specifically on the routes where it competed with Skytrain. Then the part everyone gets wrong. Laker's liquidator accused British Airways, Pan Am, TWA, Lufthansa and ten other defendants of conspiring to price him out of the market and of pressuring his financiers to pull the plug. The airlines denied it, completely, and never stopped denying it. In July 1984 the House of Lords ruled in Laker's favour — but that ruling was about whether an American court could hear his allegations. It was about jurisdiction, not guilt. No court ever found that there was a conspiracy. In July 1985, with no trial, the defendants paid around $48 million to Laker's 16,000 creditors and a further $8 million to Laker personally. British Airways' chief executive said on the record that the settlement bore "no admission of guilt." And from Britain's own declassified government files we now know two things almost nobody has reported: that on the morning of the collapse Margaret Thatcher was considering putting £5 million of public money into saving Laker, and was talked out of it by her own adviser — and that when the US Department of Justice opened a criminal grand jury investigation into British airlines over the collapse, Thatcher appealed personally to Ronald Reagan to stop it. He refused. Freddie Laker died in Florida on the 9th of February 2006, aged 83. Did you ever fly Skytrain, or queue for it? Which year, and what did you pay? I read every comment on these. #FreddieLaker #Skytrain #LakerAirways #BritishHistory #Aviation Sources include: Hansard, House of Commons, 31 July 1975 and 5 February 1982 · Margaret Thatcher Foundation declassified archive, PREM19/1298 · Laker Airways Ltd v Department of Trade [1977] QB 643 · British Airways Board v Laker Airways Ltd [1985] AC 58 · Laker Airways Ltd v Pan American World Airways, US District Court for the District of Columbia · contemporary Washington Post and UPI reporting, 1977–1985 · Bank of England historical exchange rates · 1978 Birthday Honours list