Quantas Airlines of Australia

Quantas Airlines is a strange name. You'd really wonder how any company picked such a strange name for an airline, and especially for a country's own national airline.

Well I know we're all used to the letter Q being automatically followed by the letter U, at least in the English language that is. But you see, it's not Quantas Airlines at all, it is QANTAS, and it's an acronym. Q.A.N.T.A.S. actually stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Airline System - which is what it was when it started out.

Queensland is the state where Brisbane is, and the Northern Territory - not a State as such - is hot dry desert north of Australia and its capital city is Darwin. There are lots of Australian Aborigines up in Darwin, plus miners and oil workers who work on the offshore oil rigs. It's biggest claims to fame were when It was bomber by Japanese warplanes in WWII, and when the city was wiped out by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.

Nowadays, Quantas Airlines covers every state of Australia and they just call themselves QANTAS.