BOAC absorbed BSAA in 1949, but BEA continued to operate British domestic and European routes for the next quarter century.

The Civil Aviation Act 1971 merged BOAC and BEA, effective 31 March 1974, forming today's British Airways.

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.

In 1941 longer range Consolidated Catalinas, Boeing 314As (and later converted Short Sunderlands) were introduced to guarantee non-stop Lisbon to Bathurst sectors (thus eliminating the need to refuel at Las Palmas).

[2] In late 1942, the new hard-surface airport at Lisbon permitted the use of civil registered Liberators to North and West Africa and Egypt.

The significance of the ball-bearings is debatable, but these night flights were an important diplomatic gesture of support for neutral Sweden which had two DC-3s shot down on its own service to Britain.

Since 1941, the advanced pressurised Lockheed Constellation had been under development, and in 1946 BOAC was permitted to use dollars to purchase an initial fleet of five for the prestigious North Atlantic route (there were no equivalent British types available).

Whilst the major world airlines abandoned flying-boats at the end of WWII, BOAC continued with theirs until 1950, and even introduced the new Short Solent on the leisurely Nile route to South Africa.

In 1947, Aerlínte Éireann in Ireland bought five new Lockheed 749 Constellations, and prepared to launch a transatlantic service with assistance and crew-training from Captains O. P. Jones and J. C. Kelly-Rogers of BOAC.

BOAC was also permitted to spend dollars on six new Boeing 377 Stratocruisers for its key transatlantic routes from October 1949, offering a double-deck non-stop eastbound service from New York City to London Airport (later Heathrow).

The Handley Page Hermes and Canadair DC-4M Argonaut joined the BOAC fleet between 1949 and 1950, replacing the last of the non-pressurised types on passenger services.

These long-range aircraft enabled BOAC to operate non-stop westbound flights from London and Manchester to New York and other US East Coast destinations,[5] in competition with DC-7Cs of Pan Am and Lockheed Super Constellations of Trans World Airlines (TWA).

Examination of the wreckage recovered from the Mediterranean sea-bed and observation of a sample fuselage in a pressurisation test-tank at Farnborough revealed that the repeated pressurisation / depressurisation cycles of airline operation could cause fatigue cracks in the thin aluminium alloy skin of the Comet leading to the skins ripping away explosively at altitude and disintegration of the aircraft.

Later jet airliners including the revised Comet 4 were designed to be fail-safe: in the event of, for example, a skin-failure due to cracking the damage would be localised and not catastrophic.

In the 1950s turbine powered airliners were developing rapidly, and the Comet and the seriously delayed Bristol Britannia were soon rendered obsolescent by the flight of the swept-wing Boeing 367–80 (707 prototype) in 1954.

[citation needed] In 1953 Vickers had started building the swept wing VC-7/V-1000 with Rolls-Royce Conway turbofan engines, but BOAC short-sightedly decided the Britannia and Comet 4 would be adequate for its purposes, and when the military version of the V-1000 was cancelled in 1955 the 75% complete prototype was scrapped.

[7] The Standard VC10 had higher operating costs than the 707, largely due to BOAC's requirement at the design stage for the aircraft to have excellent hot and high performance for Commonwealth (African/Asian) routes, but the larger Super VC10 was a success with American passengers on the North Atlantic and was profitable.

The chairman of BOAC, Miles Thomas, was in favour of the idea as a potential solution to a disagreement between the two airlines as to which should serve the increasingly important oil regions of the Middle East, and he had backing for his proposal from the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Rab Butler.

However, opposition from the Treasury blocked the idea, and an agreement was reached instead to allow BEA to serve Ankara in Turkey, and in return to leave all routes east and south of Cyprus to BOAC.

[9] This event coincided with the establishment of the Civil Aviation Authority, the UK's new, unified regulator for the air transport industry.

Scott Anthony and Oliver Green described in their 2012 book: “New Elizabethan ambitions made BOAC into the national flag-carrying airline in the broadest sense.

As Smith argues, BOAC were prominent promoters of the colonial development agenda, with advertisements often highlighted the positive impact of such policies in Africa often with a view to encourage further expansion and exploitation of regional resources.

[84] In The Sopranos, Season 6 Episode 19 “The Second Coming," Paulie Walnuts reminisces that he was dosed with LSD when a BOAC stewardess put it in his drink, during a 1968 visit to the Copacabana nightclub.