Does anyone know the origin of the radio callsign of British Airways, Speedbird? I’m guessing it has something to do with the Concorde, but I couldn’t find any reference to the callsign in any of the histories of the company that I could find.
It goes back much further than that. BA is made up of two other and older companies . BOAC ( British Overseas Airways Corporation ) for trans- continental flights and BEA ( British European Airways ) , which is self explanatory. Before the merger BOAC aircraft had a stylised bird as part of the company logo which appeared not only on the aircraft but on all promotional material. So , at least from the 50’s ,Speedbird has been the ATC call-sign because of this bird logo.
Halfway down this page you can see two versions of the BOAC Speedbird logo :-