On January 7th 1927, Imperial Airways assumed responsibility for the 1,100 mile Cairo to Baghdad airmail route that had been operated by the Royal Air Force since 1921. The new commercial service was initially run at fortnightly intervals and took a little over three days to complete (Salt 1930). This route was subsequently expanded east, first to Karachi in April 1929 and then Jodhpur and Delhi, in what was British India, eight months later, and passengers were accepted in addition to the mail (Pirie 2004). Services to Calcutta, Rangoon, and Singapore were inaugurated in 1933, and flights to Hong Kong were started the following year. A subsidised ‘Empire Air Mail Scheme' began operating between London and Australia in December 1934, and passengers were carried from early 1935 (Edmonds 1999). At the time, the 12,722 miles from London to Brisbane represented the longest air route in the world and took over 10 days to complete (Finch 1938). At this time, Imperial's only long-haul rival was the Dutch carrier KLM who competed with Imperial on certain Middle Eastern sectors that formed part of their Amsterdam-Batavia route (Davies 1964).
In addition to expanding east, Imperial Airways was also heading south. In 1918, the Baird Committee, reporting to Lloyd George, had advocated the inauguration of a Cairo to Cape Town air service (McCormack 1989). The route was surveyed in 1919, but financial and operational difficulties meant that scheduled services did not begin until the early 1930s. The first section of the route, from Cairo to Khartoum, was opened in 1931, and in January 1932, a regular service from London to Cape Town was inaugurated. This ran weekly, routing via Paris, Brindisi, Alexandria, Cairo and Khartoum, and linked up the ‘red route' of British colonies in Africa on the way, fulfilling Cecil Rhodes' dream of a Cape to Cairo route, albeit by air as opposed to rail, and generating a rush for passengers and routes that was not unlike the ‘scramble' for territory in the late 19th century (Brown 1932; McCormack 1976). By 1936, almost every ‘sizeable' town in British Africa, including Kano and Accra in the west, had an air service (Pirie 2004).
