For the first few decades of commercial air travel, central airline staff booked passengers on to a plane by writing their details on a card and placing it in a wooden box. Last-minute cancellations were a challenge, and airlines would lose money if aircraft flew with empty seats. Arriving in 1965 at the UK’s international flag carrier BOAC (the predecessor of British Airways), Peter Hermon, who has died aged 93, computerised not only its reservations system, but the scheduling of aircraft departures, route planning, rostering of crew, and all the engineering and financial services needed to keep the business running. The global standards in place today still owe a debt to his achievement as millions of people casually tap their phones to book a flight to Seattle or Singapore.
National airlines in the US had begun to automate their ticketing in the 1950s, but international travel was a much more complicated problem. Hermon persuaded the BOAC board to buy two IBM 360 computers at a cost of more than £3m (about £50m today). “I had a lot of prestige and power,” Hermon said in an interview for the Leo Computers Society in 2017, “and I could really do anything I liked.” The following year the company invested a further £33m, training up to 300 programmers to develop a suite of programs for a network called Boadicea. Based from 1968 in Boadicea House at London Heathrow airport, the system was connected to terminals in offices from the US to Asia.
