FLYING START

Sir Richard Branson relishes telling the story of the birth of Virgin Atlantic. On virgin.com he recalls what happened in the early 1980s when his flight from Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands was cancelled: “I had a beautiful lady waiting for me in BVI and I hired a plane and borrowed a blackboard and as a joke I wrote ‘Virgin Airlines’ on the top of the blackboard, ‘US$39 one way to BVI’. I went around all the passengers who had been bumped and I filled up my first plane.” After that he bought a second-hand B747 and “made it that much more special than all the other airlines we were competing with”.

Unfortunately, many new airlines end in failure within months – be they wholesale start-ups, rebrands or offshoots of existing carriers – proving