British Overseas Airways Corporation
On 24 November 1939, BOAC was created by Act of Parliament to become the British state airline, formed from the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd. The companies had been operating together since war was declared on 3 September 1939, when their operations were evacuated from the London area to Bristol. On 1 April 1940, BOAC started operations as a single company. Following the Fall of France (22 June 1940), BOAC aircraft kept wartime Britain connected with its colonies and the allied world, often under enemy fire, and initially with desperate shortages of long-range aircraft. During the war, the airline was sometimes loosely referred to as 'British Airways', and aircraft and equipment were marked with combinations of that title and/or the Speedbird symbol and/or the Union Flag.
British Airtours
Following the corporations' intervention, BEA Airtours acquired seven former BOAC Boeing 707-436s. These aircraft had a greater seating capacity than required and were powered by four Rolls-Royce Conway engines, an older generation engine type than the four Pratt and Whitney JT3D turbofans which powered the ex-American 707-123Bs it had originally selected to replace its Comet fleet. This meant that the ex-BOAC 707s had higher operating costs. However, BOAC was prepared to sell these aircraft to BEA Airtours at a lower price than American was asking for its planes. The £4.3m sale price included BOAC's entire spares holding (inclusive of engines) for the seven aircraft. This helped compensate for the cost differential. The first of these 174-seat aircraft entered service in 1971 while the last aircraft of this batch joined the fleet in 1973. By that time, four of the airline's nine Comet 4Bs had already been withdrawn from service and sold to rival British charter airlines.