ABSTRACT
British air transport was an obvious target for nationalisation by the Labour government after 1945.2 Although it was an industry still in its infancy, with none of the problems associated with older transport systems such as the railways,3 it was a natural candidate for public ownership. Part of the reason lay in the wartime demonstration of air power which had made people aware of the important role that civil aviation could play in the post-war world. If the commanding lead which the Americans had built up in the manufacture of transport aircraft was to be challenged, and this seemed vital for Britain's technological prowess as well as for reasons of defence and prestige, then close government supervision of both airlines and aircraft construction was necessary. It is also important to place nationalisation in the context of British civil aviation history. Within that 'long tradition of growth' in the government's responsibility for the economy,4 the establishment of the air corporations in the 1946 Civil Aviation Act can be seen as the last step in a process which had begun with the decision to subsidise Imperial Airways in 1924, and continued with the formation of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) as a nationalised undertaking by the Conservative government in 1939.5
There was nothing especially radical about the creation of BOAC and its junior partners, British European Airways (BEA) and British South American Airways (BSAA).6 While drawing very largely on the civil aviation plans of the preceding Coalition government, the 1946 Act exhibited a curious lack of clarity about long-term objectives for either the air transport business or the aircraft manufacturing industry. Indeed, it appears to be a good example of what one commentator has seen as an absence of 'systematic coherence about Labour's public ownership programme from the point of view of the economy as a whole'.7
