Guinness World Records lists the first inflight meal as a pre-packed lunchbox of sandwiches and fruit, served on a Handley Page Transport flight from London to Paris on 11 October 1919. The meals were handed out by "cabin boys", since airlines did not yet employ stewards or stewardesses, and the box cost three shillings. Guinness puts that at £6.33 in 2017 money.

The RAF Museum's 1919 aviation timeline agrees on the date, the company, the route and the price. It records 11 October 1919 as the day Handley Page Transport "served the first airline meals", a pre-packed lunch-box costing three shillings, on its London to Paris service.

Six weeks into a new airline service

The lunchbox came early in the life of the service. The same RAF Museum timeline records that Handley Page Transport started flying between Cricklewood and Bournemouth on 14 June 1919, made a press flight from Hounslow to Le Bourget on 25 August, and carried the first two women to fly on an airline service between England and France on 26 August. A regular London to Paris service began on 2 September 1919, so the lunchbox arrived about six weeks after it.

The company kept adding to the service. In December 1919, the timeline says, Handley Page Transport introduced the Handley Page W8 on the Paris route, which it describes as the first civil airliner with a lavatory on a regular passenger service.

The pictures

I have not found a photograph of the meal service itself. The pictures with this article are in the public domain: two Handley Page O/400 civil transports, G-EAKE and G-EAKG, photographed around 1920 and held by the San Diego Air and Space Museum archive, and a Library of Congress image of a Handley Page saloon from 1920. They show the kind of cabin and aircraft of the period. I am not claiming any of them is the aircraft that flew on 11 October.

On my screen

The BBBRadar desk unit shows type, registration, route where one is filed, callsign and altitude. On 27 September 2026 it showed an easyJet Airbus A319, G-EZDR, as EZY14YE, Luton to Paris Charles de Gaulle, at 2,925 feet. The same airframe appeared earlier that day as EZY79RV at 8,750 feet. That one carried no route on the screen.

Luton to Paris Charles de Gaulle is not the 1919 route, but it joins the same pair of capital cities, 107 years on.

What I have not confirmed

Guinness and the RAF Museum are the two sources I have used, and they agree on the date, the company, the route and the price. Neither tells me what was in the sandwiches, how many people were on board or which aircraft flew that day, which is why the photographs above are described as being of the period only.

Sources