KLM was founded in The Hague on October 7, 1919, and it is still flying under the same name, which no other airline can claim. Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij means royal aviation company, and Queen Wilhelmina granted the company the right to call itself royal that autumn. The man behind it was Albert Plesman, a former army pilot who had spent the war years on the ground because the Netherlands stayed neutral, and who thought an airline was the way for a small country to take part in an industry that was going to be dominated by bigger ones.
The first flight was on May 17, 1920, from Schiphol to Croydon outside London, with a British pilot borrowed for the occasion, two journalists, and several bundles of newspapers. There was no cabin. Passengers sat in wicker chairs in an open cockpit under a leather blanket. In winter the service stopped. Within a few years KLM was running scheduled routes to the main European cities, and in 1929 it opened a scheduled service to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, then the longest scheduled air route in the world, which took about ten days of flying with overnight stops.
The company's survival has rested on that kind of geography. The Netherlands is small. Its own market cannot fill aircraft, so KLM has always made its money carrying other people's traffic through Schiphol, a policy governments backed with the traffic rights Plesman negotiated himself. During the Second World War the European network stopped dead, but the Caribbean division kept flying between the islands and Suriname, and the company never stopped trading.
KLM merged with Air France in 2004, but it was done as a holding structure, and KLM kept its name, its livery, its hub at Schiphol and the right to call itself royal, which it has used without a break since 1919. Plesman ran the airline from its founding until his death in 1953, and his name is still on the company's aviation school.