Yesterday, June 22, 2014, marked the 30 year anniversary of Virgin Atlantic’s first flight.
Apart from being an inspirational article, a piece in The Telegraph by the maverick founder of Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard Branson, give us insight to his motivations, his business acumen and key differentiators that make the Virgin airlines’ group a household name today. (scroll below video for the link to the whole article).
I never intended to start an airline. All I wanted to do was get to the beautiful woman waiting for me in the British Virgin Islands. Thirty years later, I’m glad I made it.
American Airlines decided to bump all of the passengers on an evening flight from Puerto Rico to the BVI – yours truly included. So I went to the back of the airport, hired a plane, borrowed a blackboard and wrote “Virgin Air, $39 single flight”. I walked around all the stranded people and filled up the plane. As we landed, a passenger said to me: “Virgin Airways isn’t too bad – smarten up the service and you could be in business.”
and on June 22, 1984, a time recreated in this 25th anniversary video, Virgin’s first flight VS001 took off for Newark.
[bsu_youtube_advanced url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS_6HHQ7jOA” width=”640″ height=”360″ controls=”alt” autohide=”yes” showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” theme=”light”]To read the complete The Telegraph article by Sir Branson click here. To read more about the 25th anniversary video click here.
It serves only DEL and BOM from India??Do they have any plans for other cities??