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''This article deals with the 1930s airline British Airways Ltd. For the modern airline of similar name see British Airways.''
'British Airways Ltd' was a private airline company operating in Europe in the 1930s. It was first formed as 'Allied British Airways' in October, 1935 by the merger of Spartan Air Lines and United Airways (no relation to the US carrier United Airlines). It rapidly acquired Hillman's Airways, adopted its definitive name, and transferred its UK base to the new Gatwick Airport. Its corporate emblem was a winged lion.
Initially equipped with a mixture of aircraft including the de Havilland Express and the Junkers Ju 52, the competitive nature of European aviation forced it to look to importing modern aircraft from overseas to maintain its position. Acquiring the Dutch-built Fokker F.VIII and Fokker F.12 planes, it rapidly established services to Paris, Lille, Cologne, Amsterdam, Hannover, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Stockholm.
It later bought the new all-metal American Lockheed L-10 Electra and extended its routes to Hungary and Poland.
British Airways Ltd was not really a competitor to the better known Imperial Airways which flew to far-flung parts of the British Empire, enjoyed state subsidy, and used British-built aircraft, often antiquated. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd were merged into a single state-owned national carrier - British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).
Perhaps British Airways Limited's best-remembered action was that it was on one of their aircraft that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to meet Adolf Hitler for the discussions that concluded with the Munich Agreement. Photographs of Chamberlain emerging from his plane clearly display the "British Airways" logo around the aircraft door.
The British Airways name was to re-appear 35 years later when BOAC was re-merged with its 1946 spin-off British European Airways.