Flights and Frights:The Story of 22 June 1984
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After listening to our (Expedition Business) latest podcast with Scientist, Banker, Entrepreneur and sometimes pilot Frank Vein, scarlet images of planes with a lude-sounding name kept flying around in my head.
Then I happened to read the daily, Daily Maverick newsletter, and there it was under the “Facts of the Day” section (that I never read) …Virgin Atlantic launches its first flight today in 1984.
So, with my aged and abused copy of Richard Branson’s “Losing My Virginity” autobiography, I set about learning about how today came about 39 years ago.
Well, it started with a proposal to our favourite blond record label owner, Richard, something about starting a new airline from a young American lawyer…
A proposal that must have been sent to more than one person before it happened to end up on his desk of all desks…” Don’t get tempted, don’t even think about it” he kept telling himself…but he was tempted and he did think about it.
With a few absurd-sounding phone calls, back-of-the-envelope number crunching, and a heated conversation with his partners where the word “sanity” was thrown around quite a lot…the idea became more than an idea.
So, with a Masochistic time frame of 4 months to get the airline going, they leased a plane from Boeing which actually didn’t really lease planes nor had they leased, a plane(singular), before they were off.
Only of course after they had to sort out the problem of their uninsured, engine blowing up a few days before their flight, and almost blowing the name Virgin Atlantic out of the history books by putting them ￡300 000 in overdraft to replace it.
With a working engine,70 cases of champagne, and a glorious name for the plane, Maiden Voyager, they took off from Gatwick Airport on this day 39 years ago.
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Faint Heart never won fair lady, nor did they start an airline.
So today be a little less faint-hearted in the spirit of Maiden Voyager and the start of Virgin Atlantic.
History remembers the things you did that scared you.
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Remember to have a listen to corporate escapee Frank Vein as we talk about his journey towards Entrepreneurship and doing something that scared him.
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