Garuda Indonesia's first plane was bought with money raised by the people of Aceh
During Indonesia's fight for independence, merchants and residents of Aceh raised 120,000 Malayan dollars to buy a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed Gold Mountain. That aircraft flew the first commercial service of what became Garuda Indonesia, an airline named after the mythical bird that carries the Hindu god Vishnu.
The first commercial flight, from Calcutta to Rangoon on 26 January 1949, is generally treated as the founding date. That December, a plane flying as Garuda Indonesian Airways carried Sukarno from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, the name having been his suggestion. On 31 March 1950 the airline was formally set up, jointly owned by the Indonesian state and KLM, whose local subsidiary it replaced; Indonesia bought out the Dutch airline in 1954, though Dutch pilots and technicians kept training local staff for years as part of economic decolonisation.
Expansion was swift. In 1956 a Convair carried 40 pilgrims on the airline's first flight to Mecca. Jets arrived with the Convair 990 in 1963, and from 1965 DC-8s flew to Amsterdam and Frankfurt, then Rome and Paris, while Garuda became the first Indonesian airline to serve China. It eventually took 62 Fokker F28s, more than any other operator, and in 1982 launched an Airbus A300 variant that needed only two pilots instead of three.
The late 1990s brought crashes in Fukuoka and Medan, the Asian financial crisis, then the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, the Bali bombings, the 2004 tsunami and the SARS scare. Routes to the Americas ended and European service shrank, and in 2007 the European Union barred all Indonesian airlines over safety oversight concerns, a ban lifted in July 2009.
Recovery came through the Quantum Leap plan launched that year, which refreshed the logo and uniforms and aimed to nearly double the fleet from 62 to 116 aircraft. Garuda went on to win Skytrax's award for the world's best cabin crew five years running from 2014 to 2018. Harder times returned: in June 2022 a court approved restructuring of over US$9 billion in debt, it lost US$319.39 million in 2025, and Skytrax cut its rating from five stars to four in 2026.
Source: Garuda Indonesia
