Airline Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
118 free Airline trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
57 free airline trivia questions with answers. The airline is barely a century old, and its history is stranger than most passengers realise: it starts with Zeppelin airships, runs through a crop-dusting outfit that became Delta, and includes a jumbo jet designed in under three years and a supersonic jet only two airlines ever flew. This quiz is about the carriers and the business of flying, not the physics of flight. Expect the oldest airlines still going (KLM, Qantas), the low-cost revolution (Southwest, Ryanair), the giants of the Gulf, the three global alliances, frequent-flyer programs, IATA and ICAO codes and callsigns like "Speedbird", plus the aircraft that changed the industry and the nurse who became the world's first stewardess. It suits pub quizzes, aviation buffs and anyone who has spent too long in an airport lounge. Roughly a third of the questions are gentle; the rest reward people who know their hub from their alliance. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the airlines and aircraft, and the source sentence appears under each question.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which airline, founded in 1919, is the oldest still operating under its original name?
KLM
KLM has flown under the same name since 1919, keeping it even after merging with a French rival in 2004; founder Albert Plesman ran the airline until his death in 1953.
Q 02The K in KLM stands for the Dutch word Koninklijke, which means what?
Royal
Royal: the airline was granted the title before it had flown a single flight, which is why it trades in English as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
Q 03Qantas's wartime Double Sunrise flights crossed which ocean non-stop?
Indian
Indian: the flying boats took more than a day to reach Ceylon without landing, so everyone aboard watched the sun come up twice, which gave the service its name.
Q 04The acronym QANTAS originally stood for what?
Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services
Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services was registered in 1920 and spent its first months selling joy rides and charter flights in the outback before scheduled services began in 1922.
Q 05By what nickname is Qantas popularly known?
The Flying Kangaroo
The Flying Kangaroo dates from 1944, when Qantas first painted a kangaroo, copied from the one on Australia's penny coin, on its wartime Liberator aircraft.
Q 06DELAG, the world's first airline, was founded in Germany in 1909 to carry passengers aboard what kind of aircraft?
Airships
Airships: DELAG was set up to give Zeppelin's craft a market while army orders were uncertain, and it flew more than 34,000 passengers before the First World War.
Q 07Which US airline began in the 1920s as Huff Daland Dusters, a crop-dusting outfit spraying Southern cotton fields?
Delta Air Lines
Delta Air Lines took its name in 1928 from the Mississippi Delta region it served, after C. E. Woolman raised the money to buy the crop-dusting firm in Monroe, Louisiana.
Q 08Which airline was the unofficial US flag carrier before it collapsed in 1991?
Pan Am
Pan Am never recovered from the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which helped push it into bankruptcy, and its last flight landed on 4 December 1991.
Q 09Pan Am used which word for its aircraft names and radio callsigns?
Clipper
Clipper was the airline's radio callsign and the prefix for every aircraft name, a legacy of its 1930s flying boats such as the China Clipper.
Q 10Who founded Pan American Airways and led it for four decades?
Juan Trippe
Juan Trippe ran the airline until 1968 and pushed its planemaker into building the first jumbo jet by asking for an airliner two and a half times the size of its biggest jet.
Q 11Which route system, adopted by one US airline as early as 1955, is now used by most of the world's big carriers?
Hub-and-spoke
Hub-and-spoke sends flights through one central airport where passengers change planes, so an airline can link many cities with far fewer routes, which is why most big carriers adopted it.
Q 12As of 2025, which ultra-low-cost carrier flies more passengers than any other airline in Europe?
Ryanair
Ryanair began in 1985 with a single 15-seat turboprop on one route; thirty years later it was carrying more international passengers than any airline in the world.
Q 13Which Gulf airline's name has appeared on the shirts of Arsenal, Real Madrid and AC Milan?
Emirates
Q 21Which airliner was the first to be called a "jumbo jet"?
Boeing 747
The Boeing 747 was designed to carry so many passengers that the cost of flying each one would fall by about 30%, the target its first airline customer set.
Q 22Which airliner's name was chosen by a worldwide public vote in 2003?
Dreamliner
Dreamliner, the Boeing 787's name, topped a poll of about 500,000 votes from more than 160 countries; the jet replaced Boeing's scrapped Sonic Cruiser, trading speed for fuel efficiency.
Q 23Why does the first jumbo jet have its cockpit in a hump?
For a nose cargo door
For a nose cargo door: its designers expected supersonic jets to take over passenger travel, so the nose had to swing open for a second career hauling freight.
Emirates began in 1985 with two aircraft leased from Pakistan's national airline; two decades later it could afford to put its name on Arsenal's stadium as well as the shirts.
Q 14Which double-deck airliner does Dubai's biggest airline operate in greater numbers than any other carrier?
Airbus A380
Airbus A380 production ended in 2021 after the airline, by far the type's biggest customer, cut back its final order.
Q 15Founded in 1997, which grouping was the world's first global airline partnership network?
Star Alliance
Star Alliance began with five airlines from three continents pooling their networks, so a traveller could connect between them and earn miles on all of them.
Q 16Which European airline was a founding member of the first global airline alliance in 1997?
Lufthansa
Lufthansa founded the alliance with four partners, among them Scandinavian Airlines, which defected to a rival alliance in 2024.
Q 17American Airlines and British Airways were among the five founders of which airline alliance in 1999?
Oneworld
Oneworld lost a founder within 16 months of its launch: Canadian Airlines left after being bought by Air Canada, a member of a rival alliance.
Q 18Which frequent-flyer program came first in May 1981, with a rival airline copying it within days?
AAdvantage
AAdvantage opened with members already on its books: American combed its booking computers for its most frequent flyers and enrolled them before they had asked.
Q 19Ellen Church, the first airline stewardess in 1930, had originally applied to the airline for which job?
Pilot
Pilot: Ellen Church was a qualified flyer, but the airline would not put a woman at the controls, so she pitched the idea of cabin crew instead and flew as one of the first eight.
Q 20What qualification did the earliest stewardesses have to hold?
Registered nurse
Registered nurse: the airline reckoned that having nurses aboard would calm a public still afraid of flying, and it hired eight of them in 1930.
Q 24The Everett plant, built in the 1960s for the first jumbo jet, holds which distinction?
The world's largest building by volume
The world's largest building by volume went up so fast that the first jumbo was being assembled inside while the factory was still being built around it.
Q 25Which Asian airline flew the first passengers on the world's largest airliner, the superjumbo, in 2007?
Singapore Airlines
Singapore Airlines sold the seats on that first flight to Sydney in an online charity auction, with passengers paying from $560 to $100,380.
Q 26Singapore's national airline has its home base at which airport?
Changi
Changi opened in 1981 because the old airport at Paya Lebar was hemmed in by the growing city and had no room to expand.
Q 27Besides British Airways, which airline bought and flew its own fleet of Concordes?
Air France
Air France and British Airways launched supersonic services on the same day in January 1976, and no other airline ever bought the jet.
Q 28Which part of Concorde was lowered for take-off and landing?
Nose
Nose: the long needle tip that kept Concorde sleek at supersonic speed would have hidden the runway from its pilots, so it drooped whenever they needed to see the ground.
Q 29Aer Lingus pilots identify themselves to air-traffic control with which radio callsign?
Shamrock
Shamrock is spoken on the radio in place of the airline's name, so a controller calls flight 105 'Shamrock one-zero-five'; the same emblem is painted on the tails of Aer Lingus aircraft.
Q 30British Airways uses which radio callsign, inherited from BOAC?
Speedbird
Speedbird, the callsign British Airways inherited from BOAC, comes from the stylised bird logo Imperial Airways adopted in 1932.