Book excerpt: In August 1963, one of the best-selling aircraft of British civil aviation, the BAC One-Eleven, took to the skies for the first time. With an order book for sixty aircraft, more than half were from the United States, which was an unprecedented situation for a British civil aircraft. The first project for the newly formed British Aircraft Corporation, the One-Eleven was wholly designed and built by BAC, and remained in production throughout the entire seventeen-year history of the organisation, performing strongly even when profits were at a low. After flying commercially in Europe for the last time in March 2002, here the One-Eleven is celebrated in style fifty years after its maiden flight. In this revised edition, Stephen Skinner combines original research with fascinating black-and-white and colour images, as well as detailed appendices, to consider what transpired in those five decades and the place the One-Eleven holds in British aviation history.