On December 14, 1927, at an event attended by King Alfonso XIII in Madrid, two three-engine Rohrbach Rolands with capacity for ten passengers took off almost at the same time from the Madrid airport of Carabanchel and from Prat Barcelona. The flight leaving from the Spanish capital carried six daring travelers aboard, who, according to reports from that period paid 300 pesetas (a little less than two dollars today, but a lot of money in those days) to go to Barcelona and back.

Those were the operating beginnings of Iberia, a company which had formally been founded some five and a half months earlier, on June 28, 1927 on an investment of 1,100,000 pesetas. Of this amount, businessman Horacio Echeverrieta Maruri had contributed 836,000 pesetas (76% of the total investment), while Deutsche Lufthansa covered the remainder for the purchase of the first three planes.

Later on came successive changes in the name of the company, which became part of Classa (Subsidized Airlines S.A.) first and LAPE (Spanish Postal Airlines) next, until 1936, when it recovered Iberia as its name never to lose it again.

Iberia was the first airline to join Europe and South America in 1946 using Douglas DC-4s with regular flights between Madrid and Buenos Aires, a southern destination which was soon joined by Caracas, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Mexico, Havana and Río de Janeiro.

In the 50s an authentic revolution took place due to the appearance of planes provided with a pressurized passenger compartment. The first operative models were the popular Superconstellations made by Lockheed, excellent four-engine aircraft which was known to pilots however, as the best three-engine plane in the world because one of the engines had the bad habit of breaking down, mostly in mid Atlantic. Iberia purchased three of these machines to start flying to New York and soon added another two aircraft.

Then the DC-8s came in the 60s to replace ‘the best three-engine plane in the world’ and a decade later the Boeing 747 appeared on the stage. In the 80s the first Airbus, models 300 and 320 were incorporated and in1996 the first A340 of the 17 today on the Iberia fleet joined the others.

In 1999, the company started the most ambitious fleet renovating plan in its history and ended 2001 with the phase corresponding to short and medium length reach planes. One of the plan’s objectives was to achieve some uniformity in the plane models, so that last year it withdrew the DC-9s and Boeing 727s, the same was done to the DC-10s in 2000 and will soon happen to Airbus 300s.

2001 also marked a ‘before and after’ within the history of the airline. When it went on the Stock Exchange in April of that year, it culminated the privatization process of Iberia and returned to the private sphere, where it first saw the light, even though it lived most of its history as a public company.