Economy class

Economy class, also called coach class, steerage, or standard class, (colloquially: Cattle class), is the lowest travel class of seating in air travel, rail travel, and sometimes ferry or maritime travel. Historically, this travel class has been called tourist class on ocean liners and third class, or even fourth class, on railways. In some contexts or languages it is (half jokingly) referred to as "wood class" because seats and carriages in the cheapest class were literally made from wood in the 19th and early 20th century. Another common term (both in rail travel and aviation) is "coach class".

Marine

Travel classes originated from a distinction between "cabin class" and "steerage" on sailing vessels in the 18th century. Cabin class, for wealthier passengers included small cabins and a shared dining room while "steerage" provided open decks with bunks often near the tackle to operate the steering rudder, usually in converted cargo space on the "between decks" area where passengers from poorer backgrounds cooked their own meals.

Flight

Flight is the process by which an object moves, through an atmosphere (the air in the case of earth) or beyond it (as in the case of spaceflight) without direct support from any surface. This can be achieved by generating aerodynamic lift, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement.

Many things fly, from natural aviators such as birds, bats and insects to human inventions such as missiles, aircraft such as airplanes, helicopters and balloons, to rockets such as spacecraft.

The engineering aspects of flight are studied in aerospace engineering which is subdivided into aeronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through the air, and astronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through space, and in ballistics, the study of the flight of projectiles.

Types of flight

Buoyant flight

Humans have managed to construct lighter than air vehicles that raise off the ground and fly, due to their buoyancy in air.

An aerostat is a system that remains aloft primarily through the use of buoyancy to give an aircraft the same overall density as air. Aerostats include free balloons, airships, and moored balloons. An aerostat's main structural component is its envelope, a lightweight skin containing a lifting gas to provide buoyancy, to which other components are attached.

Economy

An economy (Greek οίκος-household and νέμoμαι - manage) is an area of the production, distribution or trade, and consumption of goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location. The economic agents can be individuals, businesses, organizations, or governments. Transactions occur when two parties agree to the value or price of the transacted good or service, commonly expressed in a certain currency.

Economic activity is spurred by production which uses natural resources, labor, and capital. It has changed over time due to technology (automation, accelerator of process, reduction of cost functions), innovation (new products, services, processes, new markets, expands markets, diversification of markets, niche markets, increases revenue functions) such as that which produces intellectual property and changes in industrial relations (child labor being replaced with universal access to education).

A given economy is the result of a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organization, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong (香港; "Fragrant Harbour"), officially Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is an autonomous territory on the southern coast of China at the Pearl River Estuary and the South China Sea. Hong Kong is known for its skyline and deep natural harbour. It has a land area of 1104 km² and shares its northern border with Guangdong Province of Mainland China. With around 7.2 million inhabitants of various nationalities, Hong Kong is one of the world's most densely populated metropolises.

After the First Opium War (1839–42), Hong Kong became a British colony with the perpetual cession of Hong Kong Island, followed by Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and a 99-year lease of the New Territories from 1898. Hong Kong remained under British control for about a century until the Second World War, when Japan occupied the colony from December 1941 to August 1945. After the Surrender of Japan, the British resumed control. In the 1980s, negotiations between the United Kingdom and the China resulted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which provided for the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong on 30 June 1997. The territory became a special administrative region of China with a high degree of autonomy on 1 July 1997 under the principle of one country, two systems. Disputes over the perceived misapplication of this principle have contributed to popular protests, including the 2014 Umbrella Revolution.

British Airways

British Airways, often shortened to BA, is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom and the largest airline in the United Kingdom based on fleet size. When measured by passengers carried, it is second-largest in United Kingdom (behind easyJet). The airline is based in Waterside near its main hub at London Heathrow Airport.

A British Airways Board was established by the United Kingdom government in 1972 to manage the two nationalized airline corporations, British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways, and two smaller, regional airlines, Cambrian Airways, from Cardiff, and Northeast Airlines, from Newcastle upon Tyne. On 31 March 1974, all four companies were merged to form British Airways. After almost 13 years as a state company, British Airways was privatised in February 1987 as part of a wider privatisation plan by the Conservative government. The carrier soon expanded with the acquisition of British Caledonian in 1987, followed by Dan-Air in 1992 and British Midland International in 2012.