El Al broke an airline taboo by shrinking the Atlantic Ocean in an advert
Airlines in the 1950s never showed the ocean in their advertising, fearing it would remind passengers of crashes. In 1958 El Al ran an American newspaper ad with a shrunken Atlantic and the line that from 23 December the ocean would be 20 percent smaller, promoting non-stop crossings. It ran once, and within a year sales tripled.
The airline's first flight was improvised. In September 1948, Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, needed to get home from a conference in Geneva, but an embargo stood in the way. A military C-54 transport was painted with the El Al name, fitted with extra fuel tanks for a non-stop trip and flown back the next day, after which it returned to military duty. The company was formally incorporated on 15 November 1948 and bought its first two DC-4s from American Airlines in 1949.
Its name, meaning upwards or skywards, was chosen by the first transport minister, David Remez, from a line in the Book of Hosea. Religious rules shaped the business from the start: to win the religious parties into his first coalition, David Ben-Gurion promised El Al would serve only kosher food and never fly on the Sabbath. Attempts to bend that rule in the 1970s ended with a Knesset vote in 1982, passed 58 to 54, banning such flights again.
Records followed the jet age. After years of losses, El Al made its first profit in 1960, and on 15 June 1961 a Boeing 707 flew from New York to Tel Aviv non-stop in 9 hours and 33 minutes, then the longest commercial flight in the world. In 1988 it set another mark, from Los Angeles, in 13 hours and 41 minutes.
The airline also carried out large airlifts of Jewish migrants. The most dramatic came in 1991, when Operation Solomon brought 14,500 people from Ethiopia and a single Boeing 747 carried 1,088 passengers, still the record for any commercial aircraft.
Source: El Al
