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British Airways (BA) is the flag carrier of the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in London, England, near its main hub at Heathrow Airport.

The airline is the second largest UK-based carrier, based on fleet size and passengers carried, behind easyJet. In January 2011 BA merged with Iberia, creating the International Airlines Group (IAG), a holding company registered in Madrid, Spain. IAG is the world's third-largest airline group in terms of annual revenue and the second-largest in Europe. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and in the FTSE 100 Index. British Airways is the first passenger airline to have generated more than US$1 billion on a single air route in a year (from 1 April 2017, to 31 March 2018, on the New York-JFK - London-Heathrow route).

BA was created in 1974 after a British Airways Board was established by the British government to manage the two nationalised airline corporations, British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways, and two regional airlines, Cambrian Airways and Northeast Airlines. On 31 March 1974, all four companies were merged to form British Airways. However, it marked 2019 as its centenary based on predecessor companies. After almost 13 years as a state company, BA was privatised in February 1987 as part of a wider privatisation plan by the Conservative government. The carrier expanded with the acquisition of British Caledonian in 1987, Dan-Air in 1992, and British Midland International in 2012.

A350

The Airbus A350 is a long-range, wide-body twin-engine jet airliner developed and produced by Airbus. The first A350 design proposed by Airbus in 2004, in response to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, would have been a development of the Airbus A330 with composite wings and new engines. As market support was inadequate, in 2006, Airbus switched to a clean-sheet "XWB" (eXtra Wide Body) design, powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent XWB high bypass turbofan engines. The prototype first flew on 14 June 2013 from Toulouse, France. Type certification from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) was obtained in September 2014, followed by certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) two months later.

The A350 is the first Airbus aircraft largely made of carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers. It has a new fuselage designed around a nine-abreast economy cross-section, up from the eight-abreast A330/A340. It has a common type rating with the A330. The airliner has two variants: the A350-900 typically carries 300 to 350 passengers over a 15,000-kilometre (8,100-nautical-mile; 9,300-statute-mile) range, and has a 283-tonne (617,300-pound) maximum takeoff weight (MTOW); the longer A350-1000 accommodates 350 to 410 passengers and has a maximum range of 16,100 km (8,700 nmi; 10,000 mi) and a 319 t (703,200 lb) MTOW.

On 15 January 2015, the initial A350-900 entered service with Qatar Airways, followed by the A350-1000 on 24 February 2018 with the same launch customer. As of August 2023, Singapore Airlines is the largest operator with 63 A350-900 aircraft in its fleet. A350 orders stood at 1036 aircraft, of which 552 had been delivered and all were in service with 38 operators. The global A350 fleet had completed more than 1,025,000 flights on more than 1000 routes without accidents. It succeeds the A340 and competes against Boeing's large long-haul twinjets: the Boeing 787, the Boeing 777, and its successor, the 777X.