2. Someone at de Havilland had a brainwave and the Comet 1 produced was actually what was the Comet 4 in OTL.
IIRC the version of events I've heard was that de Havilland wanted to use one of their own engine designs rather than a more powerful alternative Rolls-Royce one, but it wouldn't have been able to meet the performance figures requested so they decided to use a thinner gauge metal skin to compensate. They also for some reason used punch riveting in the construction rather than the stronger drill riveting and gluing that was specified in the original design. This led to some rather alarming things happening to one of the early models putting on a display at one of the air shows such as loud bangs being heard in the cockpit from the skin flexing announcing whenever they reached a certain speed or part of the cockpit floor bulging if they turned above a certain rate.
If you want things to go better simply have BOAC find out about this, say from having one of their people go along on a test flight, and put their foot down insisting that de Havilland build them
exactly to the original specification or they won't be buying any. The short delay whilst they go back to a thicker gauge should hopefully allow the Rolls-Royce engine to be ready by then and as an added bonus would mean that drill riveting and glue were used in the construction, also possibly rounded windows as well. Now I think jumping straight to the Comet 4 is probably rather too optimistic but this would get you to the Comet 2 straight from the off and avoid the crashes which so sullied the company's and aircraft's name internationally. You'll still likely get crashes but de Havilland's competitors such as Boeing and Douglas won't be able to use their second mover advantage to fix their aircraft in light of the data on stress concentration that came out of the air crash investigations so it will instead be much more of a level playing field. Alas it was not to be however.
Would the Americans have had a run for their money with regards to passenger jets or was it foreordained that Boeing would rule the skies?
It certainly wasn't foreordained but they did have a couple of in-built advantages over their British competitors. As a private company building airliners for mostly private airlines they were able to do their research, come up with what they thought would be the best product for their customers - not always what their customers thought they wanted at the time, and then put their money where their mouth was by using their money to develop and build it.
In the UK the government owned the two main airlines in the form of BOAC and BEA which had a monopoly plus funded a fair amount of research by both the aircraft manufacturers and the engine manufacturers. This meant that whilst BOAC and BEA as crown corporations were meant to be run as businesses with independence from the government they still had a large influence, likewise with the aerospace companies. One of the results of this was that many of the funded airliners were designed and built specifically for BOAC or BEA, meaning that they often became far too specialised for what they wanted making them unattractive to other airline companies around the world or if they got cold feet they could and did demand changes to the designs. The classic example being the de Havilland DH.121 Trident where after getting a design that looked to be a major step forward almost mirroring the later Boeing 727 and have real sales potential, Pan Am in the US were apparently very keen, BEA then got cold feet after looking at a couple of years previous traffic levels, Boeing rightly judged that it was just a blip, and requested a smaller version with fewer seats and less powerful engines. This eventually left them with a less capable aircraft, Pan Am lost all interest, and Boeing cleaned up with their 727. It gets even worse as five or six years later when BEA then decided to look at larger aircraft under the 'Airbus' development title Hawker Siddeley, who had taken over de Havilland, proposed a development of the Trident called the HS.134 that looked incredibly similar to the Boeing 757 that came along fifteen years later, but due to the government signing an agreement to develop the Hawker Siddeley HBN.100 with the French and German governments the project was shelved. The 'Airbus' would of course go on the become the Airbus A300 but due to disagreements by that point the British government had withdrawn so managing to shoot themselves in
both feet.
Basically what I'm saying is that whilst the airlines and aerospace companies benefited from government support they were also held back by the associated government influence and might well have been better off operating on their own. Now if several things such as the Comet not keeping crashing, the VC7/1000 being developed or the DH.121 Trident going ahead in its original design then we could have seen a number of changes cascading on from these events. Getting these things to happen is the hard part. I'll stop rambling now.
Having engines buried in the wings is not maintenance-friendly, compared to them being slung under like the 707 and DC-8.
True, however it is much better aerodynamically I've been led to believe. And when dealing with the early turbojet designs of the period which were underpowered compared to later models that could be important. Podded engines were definitely the way of the future so if the Comet was able to stay a success then I'd certainly expect to see them moving to that on future models.
