Comets never crashed: British airliners rule the skies

Proctol

Banned
WI if the Comets had never crashed and had been a complete success? Would an enthused, envigorated and fully financed UK air industry with a 5 year lead on the US have been unassailable at least until the 70s?

Would most of the west's airliners today have been British or of British design eg with the harder to service but aerodynamically superior wing embedded Comet-style engines, instead of the US style podded ones?

Would airliners today look something like eg the Handley Page HP111 version of the Victor bomber
http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/victor/history.html

Or was the superceding of the Brits by the Boeing type designs inevitable?
 
I don't know about the economics of pod vs. internal engines, but one thing to consider is that for decades, the biggest (and in the crucial early years, practically the only) market for medium and small airliners was in the United States. If American forms are happy to buy British liners then the Brits will do fine and while I doubt they will continue to rule the skies unchallenged, they stand a good chance at being one leading airplane manufacturer and managing a few successful merger come corporate dinnertime in the 80s. They may run into trouble matching the vast American R&D budgets that come with Pentagon orders and create lots of side benefits for civil aviation.

If American airlines have an attack of patriotism and buy Boeing and McDonnel Douglas irrespective of quality and economics as soon as they come off the production line, the 60s will be a very lean time for BAe (weren't they BAC back then?). I don't think many neutrals will buy their planes, no Eastern country will (that's what Tupolev and Ilyushin are for) and the US govt will have few inhibitions about pushing 'their' product in allied nations. European integration might help, eventually, though I find it hard to see the French government buying British airliners, even is the alternative is American . . . Lufthansa to the rescue?
 
Note: I'm going from memory here, so there may(should?) be some errors in the post.

Comet 1s were rather uneconomical to operate(typical payload and range was 36 passengers and 2200 nautical miles). Although both got better(Aerolineas Argentinas used their Comet 4s in a 102-passenger configuration; I don't know about range). Also, the wingroot-mounted configuration imposes serious limitations in engine size - forget about putting JT3D or Rolls Royce Conway turbofan engines on them. The RAF Nimrods(which are based on the Comet) needed large redesigning of the wingroots in order to fit their engines. This means you can't get that much of a range improvement. When the DC-8 and, more importantly, the 707 enter service, economics doom the Comet.

I think a better way would be pushing forward both the Bristol Britannia(so that it enters service before jet aircraft) and the VC10. These might give the British commercial aircraft industry a chance; maybe we even see more Tridents and One-Elevens around the world.

About the French; they had a big problem regarding their aircraft; they were tailorsuited to fulfill French requirements(British commercial aircraft had the same problem). They hit it big with the Caravelle(my father flew Caravelles in the early 70's; he loved them), but their next jet, the Mercure, was a failure; you can't expect being successful with an aircraft that can't fly non-stop flights to any place outside France with a decent payload AND doesn't have any chance of being improved. They only got it right with the A300.
 
Economics

Building a small jetliner doesn't make much sense. They should have built a larger one, with more engines for engine out safety, and more load for load to range flexibility, ie, 250 people five thousand miles or 500 people two thousand miles. The five thousand mile is for anywhere on the east coast of the US to anywhere in Europe, and vice versa. I believe the British didn't think that anyone would build bigger runways for bigger airplanes, either.
They had the same problem with the Great Eastern in the 1850's. The logical thing to do was build huge ships that hauled lots of steerage passengers, but they couldn't face it. They wanted to haul a smaller number of richer people and the market wasn't there. Maybe they were afraid too many people would go and increase the price of British labor?
They could have put the effort they put into nuke power into airliners, but they really wanted to break the power of the coal mining unions. If the metalurgical skill that went into developing the Magnox fuel element cladding alloy went into the alloys for the skin of the Comet, maybe it would have been fatigue resistant and not developed those cracks.
 
Comet 1950's Version of Concorde?

Could the Comet been the 1950's version of the Concorde? until the DC-8/Boeing 707, could the Airlines (BOAC, Pan-Am, etc.) have used the Comet 1/2/3 on the gold lines (NYC-London, etc.) and charged the passingers 3 times the cost of the ticket on a DC-7/Lockeed L-649/L-1649?
 
I'm not sure if the British would rule the skies but they'd certainly have gotten a lot farther. When the Comet was introduced in 1952 it was highly popular and load factors averaged over 90% (seat occupation). It quickly caught the attention of the world's major airlines and BOAC (the predecessor of British Airways) was about to introduce them on transatlantic routes sending Pan Am into a panic. Pan Am's Juan Trippe knew that Pan Am would be at a disadvantage so he quickly ordered the Comet 4 (which eventually were transferred to Guest Aerovias (predecessor of Mexicana and owned by Pan Am). So the Brits had won the first American order, soon after Capital Airlines (bought out by United in 1960) also ordered Comets. So without the crashes more orders from U.S. carriers would follow.

My reasoning is that before the 1980s international air travel was highly regulated. Prices and capacity were set by IATA and national governments, so if one flew New York-Paris in 1960 the fares on Air France, Pan Am and TWA would be exactly the same. The only way that carriers could distinguish themselves would be through service and that would include faster aircraft. In the same fashion the CAB (Civil Aeronautics Board) controlled fares and how many carriers could operate a certain route in the United States before 1978. So once Capital Airlines acquired the Comet it would have a big advantage over other domestic airlines.

Also U.S. carriers were generally not overly nationalistic when it comes to origin of aircraft. Allegheny, American and Braniff all operated BAC 1-11s. Capital operated Vickers Viscounts. United operated Viscounts and French Caravelles. Today United, US Airways, Northwest Airlines, JetBlue and Frontier Airlines all operate huge Airbus fleets as well. So if the Comet didn't crash you could bet that U.S. carriers would buy it at least until the DC-8 and 707 came into service in 1958.
 
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