History
The airline was founded in 1995 by Chief Executive Vernon Bricknell and began operating charter services within Africa for the United Nations and the World Food Programme, as well as ad hoc passenger and cargo charters. Domestic scheduled operations were started in December 1995 as Nationwide Airlines, which was one of four companies within the group consisting of Nationwide Air Charter, Nationwide Aircraft Maintenance and Nationwide Aircraft Support. In 2003 it inaugurated an intercontinental service with widebody aircraft. It is privately owned and has 800 employees (at March 2007).
Nationwide planned to expand its international operations with flights to Munich and possibly Shanghai or Beijing. A second Boeing 767 was to enter service in November 2006, however Nationwide failed to secure the purchase. Aircraft that were also under consideration for the longhaul routes were the Boeing 747-400 and Boeing 777-200ER. In February 2005, the airline began updating its fleet by introducing its first Boeing 737-500 into service. It thus became the only operator of the -500 type in South Africa.
In March 2008 the airline was awarded as the most punctual scheduled airline in 2007 between London and Johannesburg for the second consecutive year according to UK CAA statistics.
Read more about this topic: Nationwide Airlines
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)