ABSTRACT
Internal air transport enjoyed a patchy history in Britain in the period between the two world wars. Initial enthusiasm and growth in the immediate aftermath of the Great War was rapidly succeeded by insolvencies and decline. By 1924, when Imperial Airways took over from the main independent airlines, scheduled domestic flights had come to an end. Imperial Airways concerned itself exclusively with external flights, in its early days at any rate, and it was not until the early 1930s that new independent scheduled domestic air services reappeared. From 1931 the independents tried to build up their business in the face of well established services offered by large-scale surface transport concerns. For many of these fledgling airlines the struggle was too much: in Sir Peter Masefield's phrase, they 'flitted like brief shadows across the scene'.1 But some were able not only to survive but to expand (if not thereby to prosper), and to lay the foundations before the outbreak of war in 1939 of the modern network of internal air services that covers the United Kingdom.2 This article is concerned with one of the most prominent of these pioneering internal airlines, which began its existence as Highland Airways Ltd in May 1933, being transmogrified in August 1938 into the northern division of Scottish Airways Ltd. The change of name did little, however, to alter the character of the original undertaking. In both its manifestations, the concern's tone was set by the man who ran it throughout the years from 1933 to 1939, Captain Ernest Edmund Fresson.3 It is the aim of this article to examine the development of Fresson's airline up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, which put an end to normal civil flying in Britain, with particular emphasis on the natural and man-made problems it faced and on the means that were devised to overcome them.
