THE ECONOMICS OF EUROPEAN AIR TRANSPORT

Stephen Frederick Wheatcroft O.B.E. ( September 11th, 1921 - April 26th, 2016 ) was born in North London ( England ). He went from Latymer School in Edmonton ( North London, England ) to the  London School of Economics ( L.S.E. ), where he took a First in Economics, rowed on the Cam when the L.S.E. was evacuated to Cambridge ( Cambridgeshire, England ), and was President of the Union. 

During the Second World War, Stephen Wheatcroft was commissioned in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve ( R.N.V.R. ), and trained in Canada as a Fleet Air Arm pilot. He served in Indomitable with the Far East Fleet based in Trincomalee ( former Ceylon, present - day Sri Lanka ), and took part in the bombing of Japanese oil fields in Sumatra. 

On demobilisation, he briefly returned to the L.S.E., but his plans changed when he was recruited by British European Airways, whose Commercial Planning manager he was from 1946 to 1953. He then spent 2 years as a Simon Research Fellow at Manchester University, working on what would be published in 1956 as The Economics of European Air Transport. 

From 1956 to 1972, Stephen Wheatcroft was an independent consultant, working for airlines in Canada, India and the West Indies among other countries, but he was still retained as an advisor by B.E.A., and from 1967 to 1969, he served as Assessor or Technical Adviser to the official committee of inquiry into the civil air transport industry under the chairmanship of Sir Ronald Edwards ( 1910 - 1976 ). This may have been his most influential work : although the Edwards Report did not recommend the immediate amalgamation of B.E.A. and the British Overseas Airways Corporation, that was in practice its outcome, and Stephen Wheatcroft, like Edwards, became a member of the board of the new - born British Airways in 1972. 

He left for private practice again and for his own consultancy, Aviation and Tourism International, which he and his colleague Geoffrey Lipman ran from 1983 to 2000. 

( sources : www.telegraph.co.uk, Wikipedia, archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk )