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How it started
History
The airline was established in 1968 as Sahakol Air, operating air taxi services under contract from the Overseas International Construction Company (OICC), an American construction company, the United States Operations Mission (USOM), and a number of other organisations engaged in oil and natural gas exploration in the Gulf of Thailand. It began scheduled services in 1986, becoming Thailand's first privately owned domestic airline. It rebranded to become Bangkok Airways in 1989. The airline was owned by Prasert Prasarttong-Osoth (92.31 percent), Sahakol Estate (4.3 percent), Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (1.2 percent), and other shareholders (2.19 percent). At one point, it also wholly owned subsidiary airline Siem Reap Airways in Cambodia.
It built its own airport, Samui Airport on the island of Ko Samui, which opened in April 1989 and offers direct flights between the island and Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Krabi, Pattaya, Phuket, and Singapore. The airline opened its second airport in Sukhothai Province in 1996. A third airport was built in Trat Province, opening in March 2003 to serve the tourism destination of Ko Chang.
The airline made its first foray into jet aircraft in 2000, when it started adding Boeing 717s to its fleet. Until that time, Bangkok Airways had flown propeller-driven aircraft, primarily the ATR 72. It had also operated the De Havilland Canada Dash 8, the Shorts 330 and for a short time a Fokker 100. The carrier added another jet, the Airbus A320, to its fleet in 2004.
Bangkok Airways planned to order wide-body aircraft as part of its ambition to expand its fleet but these plans to expand to the long haul market eventually fell short. It wanted to add its first wide-body jets in 2006 to serve longer-haul destinations such as the UK, India, and Japan and is looking at Airbus A330, Airbus A340 and Boeing 787 aircraft. In December 2005, Bangkok Airways announced it had decided to negotiate an order for six Airbus A350-800 aircraft in a 258-seat configuration, to be delivered to the airline commencing in 2013, but the order of the aircraft was cancelled in 2011 due to the further delay of the Airbus plane.
In 2007, Royal Household Secretary General Kaewkwan Watcharoethai awarded Prasert Prasarttong-Osoth a royal warrant to display the Garuda emblem.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bangkok Airways, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2