4. The beginnings of flight insurance in 1911
Lloyd’s wrote the first insurance policy for an aviator in 1911, when the flying machine, as it was called at the time, was but eight years old, and there were but a few men and women capable of operating one. Enthusiasm for flight was high, as it were, and more and more would-be pilots took to the air. Many of them had more enthusiasm for the “sport” than flying ability, and airplane crashes were common, so common that the risk of insuring them was too high, and Lloyd’s discontinued insuring airplanes and aviators in 1912.
World War I changed the airplane from a spindly box kite with an engine to a high-performance machine capable of completing numerous useful tasks, among them the delivery of mail. In 1919 Lloyd’s underwriter Cuthbert Heath organized the British Aviation Insurance Association (BAIA). It too was short-lived, the venture lasted less than two years due to a lack of customers. Most early aviators possessed a devil-may-care attitude towards insuring against risks. In 1927, Lloyd’s insured a flight made by a former airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh when he flew solo across the Atlantic and landed in Paris, and the following year the BAIA was resurrected.