at
Sydney Airport in 1969 The decision to merge
Union Aéromaritime de Transport (UAT) with
Transports Aériens Intercontinentaux (TAI) was taken in September 1961, building on a commercial relationship between the two airlines that had begun in the early 1950s. UTA, the new company that succeeded UAT and TAI, came into being on 1 October 1963 with a capital of £2.6
mn.
Formation and early years At the time of its inception, UTA employed 4,900 personnel (including 630
aircrew) and inherited a fleet of 35 aircraft from its predecessors, comprising six
jet aircraft and 29
piston engine airliners. These were progressively repainted in UTA's new
livery, a combination of UAT's blue and TAI's green colour schemes. The inherited network spanned five continents. UTA had the largest
African network of any European airline, flying to up to 25 destinations. Its busiest scheduled route was Paris—
Abidjan, served daily in both directions. UTA primarily operated long-haul intercontinental scheduled services linking
metropolitan France with most countries in francophone West and
Central Africa, a number of countries in
anglophone West and Southern Africa (including
Ghana,
Nigeria,
Liberia,
Sierra Leone,
Malawi,
Zambia and
Zimbabwe), as well as
Angola and
Mozambique in
lusophone Southern Africa,
South Africa,
Libya in
North Africa,
Malta, the
Middle East (
Bahrain and
Oman),
South Asia (Sri Lanka),
Southeast Asia (
Indonesia,
Malaysia,
Singapore),
New Caledonia,
Australia,
New Zealand,
Tahiti and
Los Angeles. In addition, the airline had regional scheduled passenger traffic rights between
Japan, New Caledonia and New Zealand, between South Africa and the French
Réunion island in the
Indian Ocean, as well as between Tahiti and the
US West Coast. Through most of its existence UTA was one of only four wholly privately owned, independent airlines outside of the
US with a major, long-haul scheduled presence. Unlike its
British,
Canadian and
Hong Kong independent contemporaries, for most of its existence UTA did not have a network of short-/medium-haul scheduled routes nor did it compete on any of its scheduled routes with Air France, the primary French
flag carrier at the time. This made it an almost exclusively long-haul, intercontinental scheduled airline. which was to be operated by its
Aéromaritime subsidiary. In the event, these plans were scuppered by a long-running, bitter
industrial dispute between UTA's management and the
unions representing the majority of pilots at Aéromaritime as well as at UTA itself. The dispute was about the introduction of new, lower pay scales at Aéromaritime to prepare it for the competition it was likely to face at the hands of Europe's new breed of much lower
cost, aggressively expanding independent airlines, as exemplified by
UK-based
Air Europe at that time. It lasted for the better part of a year from the end of 1988 until October 1989 and resulted in the grounding of both Aéromaritime and UTA during that period. UTA's plans for a European feeder network 1986 was also the year UTA lost its
monopoly on the Paris—Papeete route to
Minerve, France's leading contemporary
charter airline. In 1988 French Transport Minister
Michel Delebarre partially reversed the French government's relaxed policy on allocating traffic rights to the country's three main contemporary scheduled airlines when he decided to deny UTA the right to fly non-stop from Paris to
Newark in direct competition with Air France. The aim was to protect Air France's position as the country's dominant scheduled carrier by making UTA a less attractive takeover target for its foreign rivals in the event of a merger. The French government feared that Air France's smaller size relative to
British Airways,
Lufthansa and the US giants as well as its fragmented long-haul network put it at a commercial disadvantage in a
liberalised air transport market. Air France, Air Inter and UTA were therefore encouraged to co-operate rather than compete with each other. On 12 January 1990 UTA, along with Air Inter and Air France itself, became part of an enlarged Air France group, which in turn became a wholly owned subsidiary of
Groupe Air France. Air France's acquisition of UTA and Air Inter was part of an early 1990s French government plan to create a unified national carrier with the
economies of scale and global reach to counter threats resulting from the
liberalisation of the air transport market in the
European Union (EU). == Corporate affairs and identity ==