The world's first passenger jet was a luxurious death trap. Now it's been brought back to life

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6 days ago

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Today, jet-powered plane travel is easy to take for granted. We're used to that surge of speed along the runway that pins us to our seats, those moments when we burst through ominous clouds into bright blue skies, and the gentle pings warning us to fasten seatbelts. And we're used to arriving at our destination in one piece.
But commercial jet travel is only 73 years old. Britain's late Queen Elizabeth II was already the monarch when the de Havilland DH106 1A Comet G-ALYP took off from London Airport — as Heathrow was then known — about 3 p.m. on May 2, 1952, carrying the world's first fare-paying jet passengers. Over the next 23 hours, with five stops along the route, it made its way 7,000 miles south to Johannesburg.
That flight marked a huge breakthrough in comfort and speed, compared to even the era's top-of-the-range propeller aircraft like the Lockheed Constellation. Gone were the constant vibrations and the sonic assault from piston engines. The world had suddenly, irreversibly, entered the jet age.
And the first jet-plane builder to claim a place in the skies, beating out United States rivals like Boeing, was the British aviation company de Havilland. That advantage wouldn't last: the original Comet DH106 enjoyed only a brief reign before a series of catastrophes led its entire fleet to be pulled out of service and then tested to destruction or left to rot.
Generations later, the only way to experience what it was like on board those first Comets is to look at grainy black-and-white film footage or color publicity photos of smiling families sitting on board DH106 1As.
Or at least, until recently, those images were all we had. Now a gang of enthusiasts has painstakingly pieced one of those pioneering jetliners back together — with thrilling results.
'A beautiful sight'
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The de Havilland Aircraft Museum is one of the world's more obscure repositories of aviation artifacts. Located in a belt of farmland and greenery northwest of London, close to the eternally congested M25 highway that encircles the British capital, it's easy to miss. There are signposts, but they point to a narrow lane between hedgerows that looks as if it leads to a farmyard or dead end.
Indeed, drive down it, and the first notable sight is a grand old manor house — Salisbury Hall, built in the 16th century and once home to Winston Churchill's mother — that usually oversees some kind of agricultural outpost. But keep going, turn a corner, and the museum reveals itself: a field filled with the hulks of old airplanes and a series of hangars that hint at more treasures inside.
The site itself is a piece of aviation history. It was here, during World War II, that a local aircraft manufacturer, founded by British aviation pioneer Geoffrey De Havilland, began work to create and test the DH98 Mosquito, an unusual wood-framed combat plane renowned for its speed. After the war, in the late 1950s, a local entrepreneur seized upon the site's legacy to open what was Britain's first aviation museum.
A bright yellow Mosquito, the only intact World War II prototype plane in existence according to museum staff, is one of the trophy exhibits at the modern de Havilland museum. It's beautifully restored, with its bomb doors hanging wide open and its large propellers, attached to Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, reaching forward.
There are other de Havilland legends of the air, both civilian and military, on display. In the corner of the Mosquito hangar is the body of a Horsa glider, an unpowered WWII transport aircraft that was towed into the air and used to deliver troops and weapons behind enemy lines.
In the next hangar — where passionate volunteers, who on some midweek days easily outnumber visitors, can be found deep in restoration projects — there's a DH100 Vampire, a single-seat fighter that was de Havilland's first jet plane. This bizarre-looking aircraft, with a twin-boom tail, was also designed at Salisbury Hall.
But the hands-down star of the museum's largest show space is the de Havilland DH106 1A Comet. For the legions of people interested in passenger jet planes and their evolution into the complex engineering miracles that now criss-cross the friendly skies, this is a worthy place of pilgrimage.
Its wings may be missing, but with its body decked out in period Air France livery, with a chrome-effect undercarriage, gleaming white roof, winged seahorse logo and French tricolor flag, the Comet is an eye-catching sight.
'It's a lovely-looking airplane, even now after all these years,' says retiree Eddie Walsh, a museum volunteer who heads up the project to restore and preserve the DH106.
That wasn't always the case for this particular aircraft, Walsh explains. When the museum took delivery of it back in 1985, it was more or less a bare metal tube — the remains of the fuselage. 'It looked very sad. Every part of it has been recovered, so the original skin, in fact, was in a very, very poor condition.'
'Utter nightmare'
Painstakingly, the volunteers slowly began restoring it to its aeronautical former glory — and today, the plane stands more or less as it would have nearly three quarters of a century ago, apart from those wings.
'We'd love to have the wings as well, but the wings would almost take up the whole bloomin' museum,' adds Walsh.
This is a shame, since the Comet's wings were also a design to behold. Unlike most subsequent commercial aircraft, the plane had its engines, four de Havilland Ghost turbojets, molded elegantly into the wing itself rather than in pods attached below it.
Despite their beauty and innovation, the fuel-thirsty engines weren't fully up to the job, struggling to drag the Comet into the air. This meant pilots sometimes pulled up too early or ran out of runway. The resulting accidents were horrendous, but the design and engineering shortcomings that eventually led to the Comet's demise were even more catastrophic.
Before it became a byword for danger, though, the Comet was a showcase for the opulent possibilities of travel. At the rear of the aircraft, a staircase ascends into the tail end of the plane. Stepping through the door is a journey right back into the history of passenger aviation. The plane's interior has been lovingly recreated by Walsh's crew, down to the finest details.
First there are the bathrooms. Unlike the single-sex facilities of modern planes, the original Comet had male and female toilets — the men's facilities fitted with a urinal, the women's with a chair, table and vanity mirror.
In the main cabin, half of the plane has been recreated along its original lines, with comfortable rows of twin seats, upholstered in swirling blue fabric that matches the pattern of the red curtains. Each seat comes with plenty of legroom, as well as chrome cup holders and — because it was built in the 1950s, ashtrays for smokers who, despite the luxury, would've made flights an 'utter nightmare,' says Walsh.
The seats look out of large rectangular windows, the signature of the first ever Comet planes — wrongly blamed at times for the plane's structural failures and replaced by rounder openings in later models.
At meal times, cumbersome wooden trays were distributed by the cabin crew, for meals that served on proper plates and eaten with proper cutlery. Overhead, there are no luggage bins, but the museum has used 3D printers to recreate molded light fittings, each with a red button to summon the 'steward.'
An almost impossible task
Such is the accuracy of the cabin recreation, it's easy to imagine what it was like on board the Comet, with real clouds whipping by outside, rather than the static ones painted on the wall of the de Havilland Museum hangar. It's not a million air miles away from the planes we now fly in, but it was certainly aimed at offering a more exclusive aviation experience.
That experience had to be made comfortable. Yes, the Comet had smooth jet engines and a pressurized cabin that allowed the plane to ascend 40,000 feet, well above the worst of the weather, and yes, it was faster than propeller-driven rival planes, but its maximum range of 1,750 miles (2,816 kilometers) was far less than that of earlier passenger service.
Long journeys, like that debut flight to Johannesburg, did go faster in the Comet, but because they had to be completed in multiple stages, total flying times were still longer than their modern-day equivalents
Nearer the front of the Comet, the first-class portion of the cabin more closely resembles a modern private jet than it does the premium seats of today's planes. Here, two pairs of seats face each other across a wooden table — a setup clearly aimed at the glamorous families.
This was the height of luxury travel. The publicity photos of the time showed passengers decked out in posh frocks and tailored suits, often sipping cocktails or tucking into lavish meals. One memorable, but highly improbable, image shows a family cheerfully watching on as a youngster builds a house of cards on the first-class table. Even with smoother jet engines, those cards wouldn't have stood for long.
The level of passenger wealth indicated in the pictures was accurate, though, says Walsh.
'It was very, very expensive,' he adds. 'I mean, on modern-day travel, you can pick up seats for next to nothing, relatively. But in those days, you had to be somebody of reasonable wealth to actually fly anywhere — especially in the Comet.' A single ticket on the Comet's first service to Johannesburg cost £175 — about £4,400, or close to $6,000, in today's money.
Past the first-class section, there's a small galley kitchen, with a hot water boiler and sink, plus a luggage section where the giant cases and steamer trunks of the wealthy flyers were held in place by a flimsy piece of netting that must've been straining to hold them during times of turbulence.
Then there's the flight deck — again, meticulously recreated by the museum's team, right down to the panel of analog dials and switches that would've been familiar to the Comet's pilots, many of whom cut their teeth flying World War II military aircraft. Here, the complicated setup hints at the efforts that have gone into restoring the plane.
Recreating it was, says Walsh, 'bordering on an impossible task.'
'How the heck do you start that? It's one of those jobs where you could stand scratching your head. 'Where do we get the bits? How do we put them together? How do we lay them out? How do we light them? But it came out, in the end, very well.'
'Too high, too fast, too soon'
Behind the seats for pilot and co-pilot, there are also chairs to accommodate a flight engineer, who would've monitored fuel consumption and kept an eye on the mechanics, and a navigator who used maps and a paper and pencil to plot routes. The navigator would also use a periscopic sextant to peer through the roof of the aircraft and calculate position based on the sun and stars — exactly like an ancient mariner.
While all this might've been archaic compared to the digital systems used in the latest passenger planes, the Comet was cutting-edge in 1952.
'It went faster, it went higher, it was much smoother to ride,' Walsh says. 'It was a revelation — the Concorde of its day.'
However, it did not hold onto that position for long.
'Too high, too fast, too soon, that was the trouble,' says Walsh.
Back in the main cabin of the de Havilland Museum's Comet, one side of the aircraft has been stripped away to reveal the skin of the fuselage and the fixings around the airplane's windows, plus the rivets used to hold them in place.
That cabin wall was the most fatal of the Comet's several flaws, as the aircraft quickly transformed from a triumph of inventive engineering to a terrifying study in design failure.
On March 3, 1953 — not even a year since its first scheduled flight — a Comet became the first passenger jet plane involved in a fatal accident when a flight operated by Canadian Pacific Airlines crashed into a drainage canal during takeoff, killing five crew and six passengers. Two months later, another crash during takeoff in India killed all 43 people on board.
Things got worse the following year. On January 10, 1954, a Comet broke apart in mid-air on a flight to Italy, killing 35 people on board. The incident raised the alarm that there were potential structural problems with the aircraft, resulting in a worldwide grounding for several weeks. Then, shortly after flights resumed, another mid-air accident on April 4, 1954, killed all 21 people on board.
After that the Comet 1A was grounded for good.
Water tank tests on Comet hulls later concluded that the aircraft's skin was unable to withstand the repeated pressurization and depressurization required for high-altitude flying. Cracks appeared around boltholes and rivets, resulting in explosive breaches in the fuselage around openings such as a cargo door or rooftop antenna.
Next to the Comet, the de Haviland museum displays a section of fuselage that was tested to breaking point. It's a tribute to the thoroughness of the aviation investigators who sought to find the airplane's fatal flaws, but also a disturbing reminder of the tragic cost of pushing the frontiers of aviation.
While the Comet 1A never flew commercially again, it spawned later versions that went on to be successful, equipped with more powerful Rolls-Royce jet engines and stronger fuselages. But by the time the Comet 4 entered service in 1958, it faced competition from Boeing's 707 and the Douglas DC-8, both of which were considered more efficient and desirable by the airlines of the time.
De Havilland's status in commercial aviation had passed its zenith. The company was later bought by another British aviation giant, Hawker Siddeley, and the brand all but vanished — although a one-time subsidiary, de Havilland Canada, is still in operation.
The Comet may have gone from the skies, but the legacy it left behind can still be seen in the airplanes we fly today. The innovation that went into the 1A, and the deadly mistakes that went with it, helped shape the aircraft that succeeded it and make them safer.
'Without somebody starting the whole thing and getting something in operation, then obviously everybody else won't follow,' adds Walsh. 'So it needs somebody innovating the idea, producing the idea and getting it working to say that an aircraft, a jet aircraft, can take off with passengers on board.
'The Comet is famed for the problems it had, which is a little bit unfair, because it was really an innovation of its time.'