Britains flag carrier

Its Aeroflot aint it? :p

If a a few more shares had been sold to SQ then VS would not even be a British carrier anymore.

I think to know ‘who’, if anyone is the British Flag Carrier you have to look at the meaning of this, historically that is. Flag carrier status came about because of bilateral agreements, and typically only one airline from each country could fly a given route, and therefore the airline was the designated flag carrier for the route. In the 1980s the UK had joint flag carriers, based on regions of the world, British Airways was the designated flag carrier to most destinations, but British Caledonian was the designated flag carrier to South America and West Africa. Certain markets featured both airlines though, although BA took flag carrier status on these destinations and regions, so for example the USA and Asia.

Officially it would be sensible to say that British Airways would be counted as the British Flag Carrier, but in actual fact VS has been the flag carrier to some destinations when only one designated carrier was permitted on a route, i.e. Shanghai. However there are no routes which VS fly that BA don’t. There are still many routes though that are assigned to only a single carrier from the UK, and as BA has these then by default it should be considered the flag carrier.

The basis of the flag carrier status was that it preserved the market status for national airlines (at a time when economic development, and the size of the air transport market dicated that it would be unwise to allow excessive competition). In reality the UK doesn’t really have a single flag carrier in the way we used to see, although my understanding is that BA does carry this status overall, as a result of its network. VS used the slogan when BA chose to drop the union flag from their tail, it was purely a marketing stunt, as is often the case with VS based on the fact that they felt BA had dropped their cultural heritage.

The US ended flag carrier status following deregulation, although this didn’t stop them assiging carriers to markets where there were restrictions, so for example, access to LHR was restricted and only certain airlines could therefore be permitted onto the market. The general preference of the US government would be full open skies agreements with every nation in the world, and then they would not have to assigne markets to individual airlines, but would allow the airlines themselves to be truly competitive, which is ironic really, given that they prop up their industry..making it almost anti-competitive…but thats another topic ;).

Any help..?

Virgin Atlantic won the British Flagship carrier in the late 90’s over BA there was some dispute against it but Virgin won.
It states it above the Virgin Lady on the front of the aircrafts.