July 25, 2008

Aviation title still flying high after 100 years

Flight International has celebrated its 100th year in business after launching just months later than the first powered flight in the UK.

The Reed Business Information title celebrated with a reception at Farnborough Air Show last week.

Editor Murdo Morrison said: ‘We came out in that first burst of enthusiasm for this new pastime that was springing up in the first decade of the 20th Century.”

The magazine is the oldest aviation weekly in the world, with its main competition coming from US publication Aviation Week.

Morrison said: ‘For the first half century of its life it was really a British magazine for the British aviation industry, then in 1960 it began writing a lot more about the global industry, particularly what was going on in the US.”

In the 1990s Flight International furthered its international status by opening up bureaux overseas, in the US, Paris and Germany.

‘From about 1990 it became a global magazine,’said Morrison. ‘In the last few years, like a lot of other publications, we’ve developed online and brought a lot of other businesses around the flight banner.”

Reed also publishes a monthly magazine called Airline Business, and has expanded online with a premium news service called Air Transport Intelligence, a website called Flight Global which Murdo claims is the biggest professional aviation website in the world, data service AirCraft Analytical System (ACAS) and a number of small niche online publications.

Flight International claims a global circulation 43,476, with 40 per cent of that in the UK.

Morrison said: ‘Like most publications its [circulation has] has gone down over the last 10 years as people’s reading habits and information gathering has changed, but that’s why we launched the website in the way we did.

‘We’ve re-orientated the whole flight business, so its much bigger now than just a magazine.”