Cathay Pacific was started by two wartime pilots with one DC-3
Two former air force pilots who had flown the Hump over the Himalayas founded Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong in 1946. Their first plane was a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed Betsy. They added Pacific to the name because Roy Farrell guessed they would one day cross that ocean, which took until the 1970s.
Australian Sydney de Kantzow and American Roy Farrell opened on 24 September 1946, using the old name for China, Cathay. Legend says the name was dreamed up over drinks in the bar of the Manila Hotel; another story places the brainstorm in a Shanghai hotel. Early routes linked Hong Kong with Manila, Sydney, Singapore, Saigon and Bangkok. In 1948 Swire and other British and Australian investors took over the business, reportedly because colonial authorities wanted it British-owned.
For a time the government split local skies in two, handing southern routes to Cathay and northern ones to its only rival, Hong Kong Airways. When those northern routes lost value, Cathay bought its competitor on 1 July 1959 and became the city's dominant airline. It carried its millionth passenger in 1964, the year its first jet arrived, and flew only jets from 1967. Its first Boeing 747 came in 1979, followed in 1980 by the London traffic rights it had been refused six years before.
A cargo arm launched in 1982 helped Hong Kong grow into a great re-export port, and the airline listed on the local stock exchange in 1986. In 1998 it co-founded the Oneworld alliance with American Airlines, British Airways, Canadian Airlines and Qantas. That July it flew the last departure from the old Kai Tak airport to Heathrow, and the next day opened the new Chek Lap Kok airport with the first nonstop transpolar flight from New York.
Labour trouble followed: in 2001, during a pilots' pay dispute, it sacked 49 of its 1,500 pilots, a group nicknamed the 49ers. Swire remains a major shareholder alongside Air China, and Skytrax rated Cathay the world's third-best airline in 2025.
Source: Cathay Pacific
