Famous Flyers - The Jet Age
The 10th of January 1954 was a ordinary day for flying at Rome's Ciampino Airport. Built south of the city, near the ancient Roman Appian Way, in 1916, the airport was, in the days before Fiumicino Airport was opened in 1961, the main airport for the Italian capital city. As befitting it's status the airport saw departures to all corners of Europe and the world, including one the most glamorous, and undoubtedly the fastest, passenger air service in the world. Standing on the runway at half past ten that Sunday morning was one of the British Overseas Airways Company's (BOAC) "Comet" airliners. The Comet was unique among aircraft. Although of average size and capacity - it could hold twenty nine passengers - it was the only jet powered airliner in the world. Perhaps more importantly, even though it had been fifteen years since the first jet plane flew, it looked like being the only jet airliner for the foreseeable future. The French Sud Aviation company planned a plane called the "Caravelle", but that would use, under license, the design of much of the Comet's forward section and it's cockpit. The Soviets and Americans, trapped in an arms race, were building thousands of military jets, but seemed content to leave passenger aviation to antiquated piston powered machines. The British aviation industry was cleaning up. With no competition, the Comet looked set to make it's creator, the de Havilland Company of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, the dominant force in passenger jets. Although expensive, the jet plane was so much faster than the conventional piston plane, over one hundred miles per hour, as well as being smoother, and more reliable, that it seemed as though every airline in the world would want some Comet's in it's fleet. Even on the shorter routes the British were creating a stranglehold. The jet was expensive, too expensive for most domestic flying, even in the United States, but the British had a solution; the Vickers Viscount. A plane with an ingenious hybrid of jet and propeller engine; the turboprop. Either way, it seemed as though the idiosyncratic British aircraft makers, part high tech manufacturing, part small cottage industry, was a major success story for the nation that had given the world industry and manufacturing, but had been battered by six years of war, and was now seeing much of it's former empire dissolving. Alas, that Sunday morning in 1954, that industry would suffer a major blow as the pinnacle of British engineering came crashing down.
What had happened was initially a mystery. A slower BOAC plane had been flying behind the Comet, also bound for London Heathrow, and had been talking with the Comet pilot over the radio when the conversation was suddenly cut off. Fishermen in the sea, near the island of Elba, off the western Italian coast, saw the plane falling in pieces into the sea. Nobody on board survived, the fragmented state of the wreckage showed that the Comet seemed to have blown apart in mid air and at cruising speed. This raised suspicion that sabotage had been the cause. The plane was an obvious target for saboteurs. Many in the American establishment had been set against the Comet right from it's unveiling, fearing that if the sleek jetliner were sold around the world it would surely be hijacked or sabotaged and end up in Soviet hands, where it would doubtlessly be used, they thought, as the basis for bomber designs. This mindset showed just how quickly the American attitude to the Russians had changed after the end of the war. Allies during the war, the two countries were soon engaged in an unprecedented peacetime arms race. The "Cold War", as it soon came to be known, would be fought for most of the rest of the century as the world divided between the capitalist Americans, and the communist Russians. The main driving force behind the cold war was nuclear weapons. Although the United Nations had been formed at the end of 1945 with the officially announced intention of ensuring that no similar global conflict ever happened again, the Americans knew that it only a matter of time before the Soviet Union created their own atom bomb, and they kept developing nuclear weapons at the same rate as they had during the war years.
By the time the Comet fell from the sky in 1954, the Cold War was in full swing. The Korean War , begun in 1950 and fought for three years had brought all of the tensions to the surface. To begin with the war had seemed like the first big test for the new United Nations. North Korea had invaded South Korea in June 1950. The United Nations Security Council had been convened to send in a coalition of allied forces to repel the North Korean aggression. Soviet Russia had been one of the five countries that had been selected as permanent members of the Security Council on it's creation in 1945, alongside France, the UK, the USA, and Republican China (now Taiwan). The Russians were displeased that the communist mainland Peoples Republic of China had been left off the council and boycotted the council meetings. When communist North Korea attacked South Korea, it was with the military assistance of it's allies in China and Russia. Only five years after the end of the Second World War, America and Europe were effectively at war with the communist east. At the top of the pile of the presents the Russians presented to the Chinese and North Koreans was their Mikoyan-Gurevich "MiG"-15 jet fighter jet. This compact plane totally outclassed the American and British planes, yet at it's heart was a British designed Rolls-Royce "Nene" jet engine. Amazingly, in the late 1940s the British government had willingly sold the technical details of their jet engine to the Russians, with the astonishingly naive understanding that it only be used for peaceful purposes. Even Stalin when presented with the proposal that he ask his wartime allies for technical assistance was dismissive at first. "What fool will sell us his secrets?" had supposedly uttered to his generals.
Unsurprisingly, the fact that their fighters were being shot down by Communist planes powered by a British engine somewhat soured the Americans relationship with the British air industry, and led to further American paranoia about the "Red threat". Already the US was spending huge amounts of money on creating a nuclear weapon arsenal, and planes for their Strategic Air Command division that could be waiting on twenty four alert to retaliate for any nuclear bomb strike from the Soviets. In the space of a decade the goal posts of air war had changed beyond all recognition. In the early 1940s, as the war raged all around the world, the skies were filled with the piston-powered Lancasters, Boeing B17 Flying Fortresses and German Heinkels, Dorniers, and Junkers. All dropping bombs of conventional high explosive. The largest of which, the 10,000 kilo British "Grand Slam" bomb, capable of destroying heavy bunkers, and so large that only one could be carried aboard a Lancaster, was thousands of times less powerful than the similarly sized uranium and plutonium atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ironically, the Grand Slam also took longer to assemble than the atomic bombs, as it's explosive core had to set for an entire month during manufacture,
Almost as soon as the Japanese surrendered on September 2nd 1945, most of the famous and iconic planes of the war were rendered obsolete by a new era of jet engined fighters and bombers. The jet engine had been developed in time to see some service in the war, but too late to have much of an impact. Had it's creator, an RAF engineer called Fank Whittle, been a more prominent member of the British military, it might have played a much greater role in the conflict. Whittle had proposed the idea behind the jet engine to the British Air Ministry a full decade before the declaration of war in 1939. As an apprentice Whittle had written a thesis to graduate from the RAF technical college, in it he proposed that faster planes could be made by utilising a plane's engine's exhaust to provide forward thrust to supplement the propeller. After graduation he refined his idea, replacing the propeller with a turbine and crucially, using the turbine to create the forward thrust,'' and'' drive an air compressor at the front of the engine. This is the principle behind how all subsequent jet engines would work, but the air ministry were not impressed. It was not a practical proposition, they reasoned. This left Whittle in both the happy position of being able to patent the idea of his own, but unfortunately lacking much in the way of resources to develop it. So the concept sat in abeyance for several years. In Germany another inventor, Hans Von Ohain, had also come up with an idea for a jet engine, albeit different from Whittle's engine with the compressor and turbine placed together at the back of the engine. Also unlike Whittle, von Ohain attracted more interest from his government, although it would be 1937 before a German jet plane - the Heinkel - would take flight.
With jet planes still on the drawing board at the beginning of the war in Europe in 1939, the military powers pressed into service planes developed during the 1930s. The two most famous protagonists of the Battle of Britain in 1940; the Spitfire and the Messerschmidt BF109 had their roots in the early 1930s. The Spitfire dated back to the Supermarine speed record holders of the early 1930s, when the company built high speed float planes to fly in the prestigious Schneider Trophy for seaplanes. The BF109 first flew in 1935, and the specification for it's design had been set out as soon as the Nazis had come to power in 1933. The American P-51 Mustang was a later development, as the British realised how vulnerable the Luftwaffe had been to fighter intercept over British shores, they pressed the Americans to come up with an escort fighter for the RAF bombers so they did not suffer the same fate over Germany. The mainstay of the RAF, the Hawker Hurricane, also took to the skies for the first time in 1935, a year before the Spitfire, and was the first true monoplane in RAF. Up until then biplanes had been the order of the day. It is a measure of the speed of progress that the 'advanced' Hurricane would come to be seen as the basic workhorse of the RAF within only a few years, and thoroughly antiquated by the later war years.
Frank Whittle had created a company to build his designs called Power Jets in 1936, but still struggled to attract funding from the air ministry. Working hard on his ideas, but struggling to scrape together the money to keep his business afloat led him close to a nervous breakdown. He knew he had a idea that would work, if only he could get the government to listen. In the end it would be Hitler's armies that would finally force those in charge to pay Whittle some attention. With the threat of imminent invasion in late 1939 the air ministry finally acted. With many other companies suddenly fully occupied with desperately trying to turn out as many conventional piston-engine fighter and bombers as possible, the small Gloster aircraft company was commissioned to build a prototype plane to fly with the Whittle jet engine. The government also enlisted the car builder Rover to provide manufacturing facilities for the jet engines. It was all too late to affect the Battle of Britain of course. Fortunately the powers- that-be hadn't been as indifferent to the strategic potential of the all-new RADAR (Radio Direction and Ranging) network as they had been with the jet engine, so the assembled ranks of "The Few" with their conventional Hurricanes and Spitfires had the crucial advantage of being able to see the Luftwaffe coming.
On May 15th 1941, with the Battle of Britain won, and the Luftwaffe thwarted, the British jet plane flew for the first time at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. The Gloster E28/39 did not look too astounding; it was compact and bulbous, with an inlet in the nose instead of a propeller, and painted in standard drab olive green and brown camouflage colours. Yet on it's first test flight it was already achieving 350 mph in level flight, already putting it level with the Spitfire. There was, however, on big fly in the ointment; Rover. The car company proved unable to provide the new jet engine on time, and when it was proposed that Rolls-Royce take over the Rover jet engine factory, in exchange for one of Rolls Royce tank engine factories, the offer was accepted, and Britain's major aero engine division was created with a simple hand shake. The newly badged Rolls-Royce Whittle Mark 2 engines powered the second Gloster test bed up up to 466 mph.
By 1943 the Gloster prototype had become fully production-ready Gloster Meteor. The single nose engine had been replaced with a pair of Rolls-Royce 'Welland' jet engines - one on each wing, partly for performance but also in case one failed. The plane had nose gear rather than a tail wheel, a bubble canopy similar to a Spitfire, a high T-shaped tail to keep the rear control surfaces out of the wash of the jet exhaust. The production Meteor entered RAF service in July 1944, just after D-Day with the Allied forces advancing across France, headed ultimately for Berlin. The jet's heavy fuel usage meant it was not suited to be an escort fighter for bombers, and the RAF initially did not want to risk the secret new fighter falling into German hands, so the Meteor's main job was as an interceptor. Most notably it was sent out to shoot down the jet-engined V1 flying bombs over the southern English coast, being the only Allied plane fast enough to catch them. In 1945, the Meteor F3, with the next development of the jet, the Rolls-Royce "Derwent" engines, and refined aerodynamic improvements worked out in wind tunnels, was deployed in Belgium for reconnaissance and ground bombing. They were painted all-over white to distinguish them from the Germans already-operational jet fighter, the Messerschmidt 262.
The 262 had it's origins in Hans von Ohain's Heinkel, but although that plane flew in 1937, it took until 1942 for the Nazis to fly the 262 fighter for the first time. The main hurdle they had faced to make a working jet was with materials. No alloys the Germans could make could withstand the heat generated in the engine, making the early German jets fragile. The project also suffered the interfering influence of Hitler, who preferred to see the jet plane acting as swift 'revenge' bomber rather than, as the engineers thought was preferable, an interceptor of the Allied heavy bombers and their fighters. The production 262 that entered Luftwaffe service was formidable but suffered from engines that wore out quickly - between 12 and 20 hours of use. It also had heavy fuel use leading to a useful sortie time of about an hour. When it did get through it had a high strike rate; there wasn't much defence the old piston engine planes could offer to the much swifter intruder. But it was all too little to late for the Nazi war effort. There were not enough 262s to swing the balance of air superiority, and outmaneouvered in the skies, the Allies took to identifying and bombing the jet fighter bases and intercepting the planes when they were taking off and landing.
The Allies knew that the 262, like much other German engineering, was good. Minus it's troublesome engines it was clearly superior in air frame design than the Meteor or the primitive first American effort at a jet plane, the Lockheed Shooting Star. The engineers of the jet fighter became the prime target of Allied interests for when the war came to it's end. The American "Operation LUSTY" targeted the secrets of Luftwaffe and Army technology, and the even larger "Operation Paperclip" the German scientists. In public at least the Americans claimed to disregard anyone with a connection to the Nazi party and war crimes. In private the Americans wanted all the brainpower they could, to prevent the Russians or the other Allies from gaining any post-war advantage. They brought Hans von Ohain over to the United States to continue work on jets for the US military. And the creator of the V2 rocket, Werner von Braun, was also set to work building rockets for America. When the Manhattan project was officially wound up with the end of the war, the US suddenly froze-out their wartime allies from any further nuclear weapon research. Within a few years, however, Russia, Britain and France would all have their own nuclear weapons, and were all working to develop larger jet planes to deploy them.
With the end of war the companies that had co-operated to build planes were back to fighting with each other. Whittle, with strong socialist political leanings, had desired to see the manufacture of his jet be nationalised. He would be disappointed, although Whittle was showered with official awards and recognition, the Power Jets company itself was bought up by the War Office's Royal Aircraft Establishment and turned into the National Gas Turbine Establishment. Whittle himself would see out the rest of his working life as a high profile consultant and would eventually move to live in the United States. The NGTE would provide invaluable research and testing facilities to the entire British aircraft industry, but that industry itself would remain fully open and competitive. While free competition was fine in principle it created a problem for the British aircraft industry. During the war years the cornucopia of British aeroplane companies that had risen in the early decades of the twentieth century - Airspeed, Avro, Blackburn, Bristol, de Havilland, English Electric, Gloster, Handley Page, Hawker, Fairey, Folland, Miles, Saunders Roe, Supermarine, Vickers, Westland - had all been involved in the war effort and were operating at full capacity. With the end of war they all had to turn a profit again, and inevitably many would be in competition for the same markets. Anticipating this problem the British Government during the war had set up a committee to plan out the future of the post war British commercial aviation industry. The Brabazon Committee had set out specifications for a range of planes for each conceivable market niche.
At the head of the Brabazon committee list was an enormous, and luxurious, plane that could fly Trans-Atlantic routes to New York and beyond. In 1944, this requirement seemed only logical as the most important. Long-range, intercontinental flying was still the preserve of either flying boats or the B-29 Superfortress bomber. But when the appropriately-named Bristol Brabazon appeared from the hangar and took to the skies in 1949 it had been completely usurped by a sleek upstart. Right from the start of the Brabazon committee meetings Geoffrey de Havilland, of the eponymous family company, had been advocating the building of a jet passenger plane. Crucially he, and others, decided against setting the bar too high, and realised that the jet would never have the range to cross the Atlantic. That job would be left to more conventional piston-planes. Unfortunately the Brabazon prototype would not be the plane for the job. Even though flying in the early 1950s was still largely a preserve of the rich the economics of Bristol's monster did not add up. The plane was fifty metres long, with a seventy metre wingspan; comparable with modern jet liners. But it seated around one hundred people. With other, far more economical alternatives available, there were no takers for the Brabazon. Meanwhile the forward-thinking de Havilland company was making great progress with the development of high speed jet aircraft.
For a time de Havilland had considered a radical approach to the planned jet liner. Their Dh-108 jet test plane was closing in on the speed of sound. The Dh-108 was like nothing seen before in Britain; it had no tail wings at all, just a swept back wing and tail fin. Swept wings, a unfulfilled concept from the earliest days of flying, were more aerodynamic, but planes had simply never been fast enough before to justify their development. A series of crashes that destroyed all three DH-108s, including a crash that killed Geoffrey de Havilland's son, Geoffrey Jr. In those days when the test pilots were national idols the crash had been shocking front page news, and it showed how dangerous this new high speed territory could be. Examination of the Dh108 and it's ill-fated pilot had shown that extremely high frequency oscillations had killed Geoffrey Jr in his seat from a broken neck, before the plane even fell out of control. The crashes shied the company away from it's more radical ideas about a tail-less airliner, and they concentrated on creating a more conventional plane.
The de Havilland jet liner was far from the only passenger plane project of the post war years. The immediate end to war had led to many of the plane manufacturers simply converting their wartime bomber designs into passenger craft. The Avro Lancaster became the Lancastrian passenger plane. The Handley Page Halifax bomber became the 12-seat "Halton". In America the Boeing B-29 Superfortress became the Boeing "Stratocruiser". In the Stratocruiser the distinctive fish-bowl glass nose of the bomber was reverted back to a more practical look of the short lived pre-war Stratoliner, and the sleek B-29 pressurised fuselage was augmented by a second deck underneath, where airlines installed a luxury passenger lounge, giving the plane an oddly bulbous appearance. These designs were clearly only a stopgap measure and in the next few years a new generation of designs appeared, all to great fanfare, but not always to much success. Avro unveiled it's "Tudor" passenger plane and Handley Page the "Hermes" but both would turn out to troublesome flops. Two of the most elegant planes of the late 1940s were the American Lockheed Constellation, with a beautifully tapered fuselage, and the British AirSpeed Ambassador. The Constellation was a major success for Lockheed, originally planned as a potential competitor for the B-29 bomber, it had been adapted for passenger use to great commercial interest. Perhaps many airlines were simply charmed by it's sleek lines, three finned tail, and romantic name. Although more workmanlike appearance, and in name, Douglas picked up where they had left off before the war with the Dc-6 and Dc-7. The handsome Ambassador, by contrast, was suffering from competition by the increasing glut of designs coming out of Britain's huge number of plane builders, and only twenty five ever built.
All of these planes had one thing in common; they were still piston planes. While the world's governments desired jets for military use, for passenger planes the demand for anything more high performance than propeller power seemed almost non-existent. This despite the many problems with piston engines. The Lockheed "Connie" may have been a thing of beauty but with the big pistons of it's four engines slamming up and down hundreds of thousands of times in a single flight, it was rough, slow and prone to breakdowns. The long distance operation of piston planes was not an easy task given their limitations. Most still flew low over high mountain ranges, in an era were very little was known about the air currents at high altitude, and the jet-streams that drive the weather. A famous incident in the immediate post war years illustrated the problem. In 1947 an Avro Lancastrian plane run by the British South American airline carrying eight people disappeared without a trace on a flight over the Andes mountains en route to Santiago, Chile. The plane vanished only minutes before landing at Santiago, and the mystery of what had happened to it lay unsolved for over fifty years. The mystery of it's last radio transmission fuelled fevered speculation that ventured into the realm of the supernatural. The radio operator had called Santiago announcing their imminent arrival, and concluded his code message with a strange phrase; 'S.T.E.N.D.E.C.'. The eerie mystery of "Stendec" and the plane's total disappearance remained one of the world's most famous mysteries until climbers in the late 1990s found what was left of the plane, at the foot of a glacier 15,000 feet in the sky. Experts, used to more recent crash scenes, with electronic flight recorders, witnesses, and air traffic recorders, could not say for certain why the plane had crashed - and also could never explain the mystery word "Stendec". Given that Lancastrian could fly up to 23,000 feet, the engines seemed to be under power, the controls looked undamaged, and the crew had radioed their expected arrival, the best theory experts can up with to fit the evidence was that the plane had started to descend for Santiago too early. The crew might have underestimated their position due to the jet stream winds over the mountains being far more powerful than was known in 1947. Other theories suggest that leeward winds over the mountains had damaged the plane or pushed it down too low, and the crew, probably flying in heavy cloud, were suddenly placed in a trap their plane could not climb out of.
Either way, such a crash showed the inevitable dangers of flying over mountains or the oceans when the planes reached their limits. The enormous number of planes vanished in the so-called "Bermuda Triangle" off the busy shores of Florida and the northern Caribbean, and the lesser known, but statistically more real "Nevada Triangle" of the high Sierra Nevada mountains between California and Nevada, testify to the problems. The physical dangers were exacerabated by a lack of infrastructure. The war years had developed planes that were larger and could fly faster than ever before and left lots of large new runways, but other aspects of flying remained primitive. Navigation was often still done by Dead Reckoning; working out position much as sailors and flyers had always done before, with a pencil, paper, some arithmetic, a compass, a sextant and a watch. There were usually no designated air routes, certainly not across whole continents. In 1956 a TWA Lockheed Constellation and an Eastern Airlines DC7 collided over the Grand Canyon, with the loss of 128 lives. Although it was a clear day neither set of pilots had seen each other, and as the planes were "off airways", the air traffic controller was not responsible for maintaining the separation of the two planes. Commercial pilots were simply advised to "see and be seen", following the same basic visual flight rules (or 'VFR's') as pilots of the smallest planes. Two years later it happened again; this time a military jet fighter hit a United Air DC-7 near Las Vegas, and the US government stepped in to begin to modernise air traffic control systems and establish more fixed air routes.
The jet in the Las Vegas case, a two seat North American F-100 Super Sabre, showed how much military jets had pushed ahead of passenger planes during the 1950s. It was twice as fast as the Douglas DC-7 it collided with, indeed the tremendous closing speed had been a factor in the collision. It also flew nearly twice as high as the airliners, as well as, for good measure, looking like something out of a much more advanced and exciting century. The Super Sabre jet appeared in US Air Force service ten years after the Gloster Meteor, and although the Second World War had ended only one year into that interval, the pressures of the new nuclear "Cold" war with the Communist powers had led to the ever-continuing push for development. America was developing a gargantuan peacetime military industry, with the jet bombers and fighters at the forefront. To begin with the newly formed Strategic Air Command, tasked with the deployment of America's nuclear weapons should they ever be needed, used the B29 Superfortress, and the nine nuclear bombs that remained as a legacy of the Manhattan project. The B-29 would be upgraded to the improved, but similar looking B-50, and joined in 1949 by the gigantic Convair B-36, given the un-ironic callsign "Peacemaker". The specifications for the Peacemaker had been set out long before in the darkest days of the war, but by the time of it's arrival the war was over and the ten engine, fifty metre long, monster was put to work as a nuclear bomb hauler. Had it been intended as a passenger plane like the Bristol Brabazon, to which it was comparable in size, the B-36 would doubtless have been a similar white elephant. With it's six radial piston engines (needed fifty spark plugs per plane), supplemented by four jet engines, it would have cost any airline a fortune to run.
A similar story would have been likely with the next big Boeing project had it not been intended for the hands of the SAC rather than airlines. Boeing benefited hugely from examining German wartime data on swept wings and the Me-262 fighter, to build what was in it's essence a very large jet fighter plane. The finished B-47 Stratojet, appearing for the first time in 1947, was an exciting sight indeed with performance to match, but it was not the easiest plane to handle. The long, thin swept back wings looked good, and had low drag, but were very hard to fly at low speeds. Pilots found themselves needing to be pin-point accurate lining up for landing, and careful not to land anything but totally wings-level. The British went for a more conventional route. The English Electric Canberra jet bomber, and reconnaissance plane looked much like a very large Meteor fighter. It had very wide straight wings and engines recessed into the wings. The Canberra was a great success around the world, being the first jet bomber aircraft for many air forces, especially in the countries of the newly established British Commonwealth of Nations, the former British Empire colonies. The Canberra was relatively straightforward to fly and maintain, and could fly to great altitudes. It set a record in 1957 of 70,310 ft (21,430 m). Even the Americans found it fitted an important role in their air forces and licensed the design as the Martin-B57 Canberra.
With everybody else designing and building bombers and fighters only de Havilland seemed willing, or perhaps capable, of bringing the jet age to everyday people. In 1949 they rolled out the DH106 Comet. Even to modern eyes the prototype Comet looks striking. It was much smaller than most modern airliners, but it's clean rakish lines, enhanced by having the engines hidden in the root of the wing, rather than hanging underneath, and the dart-like shape of the wings, make it look fast even today. In 1949 the Comet was breathtaking, and was shown off to the public and industry at the Farnborough Airshow. De Havilland's achievement in creating the only passenger jet plane was even more impressive when put in the context of a perilous era when the norm was for nearly every military plane to developed at the cost of several test pilot's lives. In an era before computer simulations the only way to test the new designs was to fly them, and deliberately push the limits of performance to see what needed improving. The made being a test pilot for an aircraft company in the late 1940s and in the 1950s an incredibly dangerous occupation, even accounting for the end of the war, and the creation of the reliable high-speed ejector seat. Many pilots were naturally not keen to lose their planes entirely, or to see the plane drop onto the heads, or houses, of unsuspecting people below, and would try to hang on, often with terminal results.
Naturally the Comet could not possibly have ejector seats installed for all of it's passengers, so it was extensively tested, before it's introduction with BOAC in 1952. Comet G-ALYP took to the air from London on May 2nd 1952 to fly to Johannesburg with the first ever jet passengers. A year later the British Royals, the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, flew on a Comet, and the orders from the world's airlines started pouring in. Not everything was rosy in de Havilland's world; two early Comets were soon lost in incidents on takeoffs. In the first, a BOAC plane was wrecked at Rome airport but everybody on board escaped. But in the second all eleven occupants of Canadian Pacific Airlines' first Comet were killed at Karachi when the plane was on it's delivery flight. Both crashes were caused by the pilots, used to much slower piston planes, pulling their planes up too abruptly from the runway and stalling the wings. The problem had already been anticipated by the designers. The controls of the Comet, like the military jets, were not directly linked to the control surfaces. At the much higher speeds offered by the jet engine the pilot would easily tear their plane to pieces had the controls been linked with cables, so the engineers had to draw up systems of hydraulics, servos, and gears to translate the pilot's inputs, and then had to think up ways to artificially re-introduce the 'feel' of the controls back into them again. It was this lack of feedback that had misled the pilots of the crashed planes, used as they were to control columns that felt much heavier. The Comet was much more easy to fly - perhaps too easy to fly at first.
Two months after the first fatal Comet crash came much worse. A second BOAC plane broke apart in severe storms near Calcutta, this time with paying passengers on board. Again, everyone on board was lost, and again, the pilots had caused the problem by being too harsh with the controls in the turbulent air of the storm. Then came the fateful crash off Italy. This time it was the first passenger Comet, G-ALYP that had been lost, a third BOAC Comet lost of the original ten. While the theories of sabotage swirled around, the Royal Navy got on with recovering the wreck. While that recovery was in motion yet another Comet crashed, in almost identical circumstances over the ocean near Naples. This would be the last straw for the British authorities and the all of planes were grounded immediately, adding financial disaster for de Havilland to the human cost. When it was recovered the debris of G-ALYP would tell the story. There had been no sabotage; the plane had cracked around the corners of one of the square cutouts in the roof. At full speed, under full cabin pressure, it had simply exploded apart. Again, like the previous problem with the controls, de Havilland's engineers had anticipated the potential risks of the pressure hull, and had tested it extensively. As part of the investigation into the crashes, their test technique had been recreated, with one of the grounded BOAC plane submerged in a giant water tank. Eventually, after the simulation of over 3000 flights, one of the windows of the test plane cracked apart at it's corner and the fuselage - filled with water this time rather than air - burst open. Tragically, de Havilland had been doing exactly the right testing before the Comet ever flew, they simply hadn't been doing it thoroughly enough to match the real stresses the jet liner would encounter.
While the Comet had been going through it's mercurial life, the British military had rather more success with it's jet nuclear bomber force. The plans for Britain to have a large nuclear-ready bomber fleet were drawn up as soon as the jet engine had proven itself in service. In 1947 when the plans for the "V-Force" ("V" for Victory, inspired by Churchill's famous v-sign pose popularised during the war) were set in motion the RAF was still relying on the wartime Lancaster and Halifax. These were fine planes during the war years but would clearly be sitting ducks to the new jet fighters. With such a large selection of plane manufacturers to choose from the government threw open the challenge to anyone who cared to try and fulfill the brief. The unsettling fact for the UK with the advent of the cold war was that it was sat right in the middle between the USA and USSR, and the UK government was determined to develop planes that would be a suitably intimidating presence to any possible Soviet aggression. There was also the matter of pride; no Britons were going to be reliant on American military assistance in the event of communist nuclear attack. The V-Force would be fast, maneuverable, long-range and ready to scramble at a moment's notice to head to Moscow. The new medium range Canberra jet bomber had impressive performance, but it couldn't reach deep into Russia. Something bigger was needed.
Three companies took the lead with projects for the V-force. Vickers flew a prototype first; their plane was a conventional design, with slightly swept wings, four jets in the wing roots, and a slightly unusual tail with the tailplane mid way up the fin. Initially the government were not impressed by the "Valiant", as Vickers called their prototype. It was too conservative, those in charge thought. But Vickers argued back that while the Valiant was a fairly straightforward design, it could be in the air and in service much sooner than any of it's competitors. This was undoubtedly true; Avro, makers of the Lancaster, with great experience of building large planes, had naturally begun work on the new bomber project, but was pursuing building a plane with a triangular "delta" wing. Delta wings were yet another innovation that had been driven forward by German engineers during the war, and from which the allies would benefit by getting their hands on the German research data. Of particular interest was work carried out by the German aerodynamicist Alexander Lippisch, who had designed the volatile but extremely fast Me-163 "Komet" rocket interceptor plane that had very briefly terrorised allied bombers in the last years of the war. The extraordinary Horten Ho 229 "flying wing" fighter, that never made it past early prototype stage, was also received with great interest by allied designers, including Avro, whose small '707' delta test plane owed a great deal to the Horten.
The Avro 707 demonstrated the advantages that the delta wing had over a simple swept wing, and that Avro hoped to transfer to their design for a V-bomber. The delta wing promised high speeds with greater maneuverability, with the added advantage that the triangular shape could hold large fuel tanks. The Avro Vulcan promised to be a bomber that could out-turn any fighters that came to intercept it. Not that it would be necessarily be alone in this ability. If the Valiant was conventional, and the Vulcan futuristic, third planned V-bomber, the Handley Page Victor, would be downright bizarre. The Victor had a huge bulbous nose, a Y-shaped tail and wings tapering out from giant finned air intakes, giving the plane the appearance of a giant winged shark. Both the Vulcan and Victor required a great deal more work in design and testing than the Valiant, as Vickers had anticipated. The Valiant took to the skies for the first time in May 1951, while both of it's compatriots were still on the drawing board. The unpainted silver Valiant prototype wowed the Farnborough airshow just as the Comet airliner had two years earlier. The sleek jet bomber looked like something from a different galaxy compared to the piston planes of the war years only six years before.
The Valiant would drop Britain's first atomic bomb in 1956 and it's first hydrogen bomb in 1957, the only V Bomber that would drop a nuclear weapon. Of course, both drops were tests, in
respectively the South Western Australian desert, and the middle of the Pacific ocean. The Valiant would be used in more conventional bombing raids during the Suez crisis, thus previewing the role that the nuclear bombers would come to take up over the following decades; less nuclear stand off deterrent and missile carrier, than conventional bomber support for ground troops, and an in-flight refuelling tanker for fighter jets right up into the 1990s. That was all in the future in 1955 however, and nobody at the time could foresee that the three V-bombers would pretty much be the last gasp of the British aircraft industry at it's height. The British government during the 1950s was increasingly aware that the Brabazon commitee brief a decade before had led to very little except the Viscount, and the now-grounded Comet. The vast array of British companies, with lots of good ideas but often now severely lacking in money and orders, were clearly going to lead themselves financial ruin unless something was done to intervene. The V-force, even as it was taking flight for the first time, was demonstrating the problem of too much supply and not enough demand. Vickers made one hundred Valiants, compared to Boeing, with the monopoly on the US Air Force, making over two thousand B-47 Stratojets. The smaller Canberra bomber was a huge success around the world, but among countries that had no desire or resources for Britain to supply them with anything larger, and especially not anything with nuclear missile carrying capability. There started a process to rationalise the various companies, mostly under two new names; British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), and Hawker Siddeley. The latter had already bought up many of the smaller companies, while the former was a new consortium of mergers created at government insistence,
The air industry would also be damaged by an equally well-meaning but ultimately disastrously misguided official decision. In a 1957 ministers proposed that the rapid improvements in ballistic missile technology would render long range bombers obsolete, even as the ongoing Suez crisis was demonstrating this was obvious nonsense. The plane makers, aware that the tide was turning against them, made efforts to develop airliners using their military technology, but here too they were frustrated by British officialdom. With the Comet grounded, American companies were waking up to jet passenger planes and, with their history of cut-throat competition with each other, were aware of the importance of getting passengers on seats. British ministers, and the heads of the big airlines, were already starting to forget the Comet, even with the redesigned and greatly enlarged Comet-4 ready to enter service, and looked on with interest at American developments, despite the obvious damage this would cause the home grown industry. The three V bombers would turn out to be some of the last planes their three makers would design and build under their own names, something that would have seemed an astonishing thought when the designs were first begun. Vickers would be one of the merged companies in BAC, Avro had already been bought up by Hawker Siddeley and the name would vanish forever in 1963. Meanwhile Handley Page stayed independent and struggled on until they went out of business in 1970. Ironically the conservative Vickers Valiant, intended as the reliable mainstay in case the more radical alternatives failed, was the first V-bomber to be withdrawn. As early as the mid 1960s, only a decade into their service, fatigue cracks in the wings were found to be common problem. Too expensive to fix, reckoned the government, who mothballed all the Valiants.
That left the Vulcan and Victor. The small Avro 707 test plane had not prepared Britain's public for the sight of the first prototype of the Vulcan at Farnborough in 1952, the year after the Valiant's first flight there. The giant triangular plane certainly looked the part, and sounded it too thanks to it's four huge Rolls Royce engines. The god-like naming continued with the engines, called 'Olympus' jets, they had a thunder-like crackle to match the dramatic looks. Also striking was the colour. Military planes had always been done out in olive greens and browns, for obvious camouflage reasons, but the Vulcan was all-over brilliant white. This was 'anti-flash' white, to reflect the heat of any nearby atomic blast, a stark indicator of the brave new world the Vulcan was designed for. The Olympus engines hadn't been ready in time for the Vulcan's first flights, and when they were installed the subsequent speed boost led to unsettling vibrations in the wing. A redesign was ordered, and the straight edges of the wings became slightly curving, thus giving the plane a graceful animal-like profile. If the Victor was a giant shark, then the production Vulcan had the aspect of a jet powered manta-ray. It even had similar moves to it's oceanic equivalent. At the 1955 Farnborough air show the Avro test pilot barrel rolled the Vulcan.
The Vulcan was spectacular, but the Victor was arguably the most complete of the three V-force planes. It was a little bit faster, had a much larger bomb load, and larger crew area. The crew of the Vulcan were crammed into a tiny bubble cockpit on top of their plane, squeezed in for missions that could last many hours. Not that the Victor was without problems. The prototype crashed in 1954, after a year of test flights, killing it's crew when the Y-tail sheared apart. The Victor took a lot of fine tuning to prevent dangerous oscillations, or 'flutters' as the test pilots called the frightening tendency of the tail and the complex wing to encounter "killer" frequencies. During these testing periods the Victor became the first four-engine heavy bomber to smash through the speed of sound. It could turn in a two-g turn close to mach-one if needed too, and could outrun all the British fighter planes. Indeed the only British-based fighters that could catch it were in the hands of the US Air Force. It's aerodynamics were balanced enough that it was very hard to stall, and it would effectively land itself if placed on the right glideslope. But even as the Vulcan and Victor coming into service their original purpose was gradually being downgraded. Russian air defenses were far more comprehensive that had been envisaged a few years before and the focus for delivering nuclear weapons was rapidly shifting to missiles. Even the Americans were giving up on some of their more extravagant planes, planes like the supersonic Convair Hustler bomber, the replacement for the B-47. All the jet bombers began to deployed for much lower level strikes. Out went the anti-flash white on the Valiant, Vulcan and Victor, in came conventional camouflage colours.
The height of the RAF had been in the early 1950s. Later in the decade squadrons were being disbanded and plane projects being cancelled. A supersonic Avro successor to the Vulcan was scratched while it was still on the drawing board. Much more controversially, the BAC TSR-2 high speed bomber was cancelled in the 1960s with several prototypes already flying. BAC did end up building the moderately successful Trident medium airliner, and the pre-existing Vickers VC-10. The elegant VC-10 was the last entirely British large jet plane. BOAC had specified the VC-10, then shied away when the time came to buy them, favouring the new American jet liner, the Boeing 707. The 707 traced it's lineage back to the B47 and the enormous B-52 bomber. The giant B-52, officially the Stratofortress, but also known by it's crews as the "BUFF" (Big Ugly Fat Fucker), was originally conceived as a super-long range nuclear standoff bomber, but came to be a mainstay of low-level bombing raids in the 1960s as another war, again in the far east loomed in the distance. As the conflict in Vietnam threatened even the resource-rich Americans felt the need to consolidate. The elegant Lockheed Constellation was a beautiful sight to behold, but it's tapered fuselage meant it needed lots of different tools and parts, making it more expensive than it needed to be. The fiasco of Convair 880-990 jet airliner project showed how much money there was to lost in the airliner game. Boeing's unveiling of the "Dash 80" project, utilizing lessons learned from both the B-52 and the stricken de Havilland Comet set a fire under the American industry, until the mid-1950s seemingly indifferent to passenger jets. The production Boeing 707 was followed by the Douglas DC-8, and the Convair 880. Their wasn't room for all three at the table, however, and Convair was hit by some of the largest ever corporate losses in history at the time. The 707 set Boeing off on a course that it has not altered from ever since, while the B-52 still flies in the US Air Force front line, and is set to be in service until nearly a century after it's first flight.
As for the Vulcan and Victor the two products of post-war paranoia combined with British engineering wizardry, continued through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Two of the most daring and exciting planes ever to fly saw the entire flying world change beyond all recognition during their working lives. The Vulcan would be overtaken, literally and figuratively by it's spiritual successor; Concorde. Concorde, a joint project between BAC and the French, would benefit from much of the work done to create the Vulcan. It was also be powered by the same thundering Rolls Royce Olympus engines. For a time the Vulcans would continue in a nuclear standoff role, carrying the giant "Blue Steel" missile, but the development of nuclear missiles housed aboard nuclear-powered submarines, submarines that could stay concealed for months vs the plane's mere hours, led to the effective end of jet nuclear bombers in the skies. Both the Vulcan and Victor also took up the important role of in-air refuelling for RAF forces; their speed and maneuverability made them ideal for this role. It was as the tanker that the last of the V-bombers, the eight Victors that flew in the 1991 Gulf war, saw out their working lives in 1993. By then the Boeing 707 had become the planned Boeing 777, with fly-by-wire computer controls, and seating for over three hundred passengers, yet still not outpacing the old British bombers of the 1950s. The BAC had become British Aerospace, and the Concorde had proven a commercial dead end, the Trident, the VC-10, and the resurrected de Havilland Comet-4 had all been retired. Rolls-Royce continue the story begun by Frank Whittle, still building giant jet engines for planes all around the world, and the British aero industry is still large - it just doesn't quite excite in the ways it once did. Only one Valiant still exists, as a static museum display, there are more Victors but only one can roll under it's own power, and until 2015, when it will be retired to it's own personal museum, a flying Vulcan bomber still wows the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the generation that created it. Soon, it too will be grounded for good, the last relic of an era when the British held their own in the skies, and with some style and a thundering jet engine roar.
