More likely BAE as I can't see de Havilland managing to stay independent up to modern times, the financial and government pressures to merge would just be too great. I think they could maybe have sold 200-250, maybe 300 at the most, before they reached the maximum they could do with the design and had to start afresh. The various British aviation companies did have a wide range of models and ideas that could have covered the market if things had been handled somewhat better.
For commercial aircraft in an ideal, everything goes absolutely perfect, avoiding all the stupid mistakes timeline I say things would generally go
- BOAC find out about the shortcuts de Havilland are taking and demand that they switch to Rolls-Royce Avon engines, this adds six months extra to the launch date but allows for the slightly enlarged longer range version to be the initial launch version
- With the great success and no crashes the Comet 2 is quickly launched with improved engines and the fuselage stretched an extra 15 feet, our timeline's Comet 3/4, later improved models begin the first trans-Atlantic jet flights via Gander
- With a larger eye towards foreign sales the Air Ministry steps in and stops the RAF from demanding too many military-specific modifications for the V-1000 with Vickers decided to go with podded engines, when the RAF pulls out the government grants launch aid and the Ministry sits on BOAC when they start making noises, the VC-7 launches at roughly the same time as the Boeing 707 with comparable performance
- With their large African and Asian routes a modified version with a T-tail and the engine pods moved to the rear plus slightly re-designed wing is introduced as the VC-10
- Taking the success with the Comet de Havilland stick to their guns with their DH.121 Trident design when BEA starts getting jittery over a small drop in air passenger numbers, appeals to the Air Ministry see them side with de Havilland and the Trident launches at the same time as the Boeing 727 being a match for any of the American planes of the period
- The BAC One-Eleven is launched and enjoys the success it did in our timeline, from previous experience BEA dithering isn't allowed to stand in the way of the improved stretched 500 version that builds upon its success in the US to be a competitor to the Boeing 737
- This success sees the BAC Two-Eleven and Three-Eleven developments go ahead to compete with the Boeing 727-200 variants
- In 1965 when BEA puts out their specification for an 'Airbus' Hawker Siddeley as the parent company of de Havilland modify their Trident design as the HS.134 by extending the fuselage, moving the engines to the wings and changing them to turbofans, switch to low mounted tail but keep the same nose - essentially what Boeing did with the 727 to create the 757 15 years later, the HS.134 steals a march and is wildly successful
- A variant of the HS.134 looks like a good fit for the Airbus A300 and developments to steal a march on both it and the later Boeing 767, the UK could go it alone or if they join the European Airbus consortium it puts them in a much stronger position likely to take the lead on the project
- The major hole in their inventory is going to be the 747 and I'm not sure there'd be a driver for a British one before Boeing makes the move, BAC will be too busy with Concorde but I could see Hawker Siddeley potentially having a go at developing a reply to the 747 perhaps as a joint-venture with a contribution from BAC presaging the merger to become British Aerospace later on
- An alternative could be a European consortium to build a 747 competitor and develop future Airbus variants
But like I said this is the 'the Gods smiles upon them' scenario.
I like this. My only argument would be with the existence of both a two-eleven and three-eleven. They were really successors to each other, and it was the three-eleven much more than the HS.134 that was equivalent to the A300. I'd think the more likely scenario, and the one less likely to end up in financial disaster and duplicated effort is that you get the three-eleven and the 134, with the two-eleven seen as addressing the same market as the 134 and both projects being two much for BAC to take on simultaneously in any case.
The interesting question to me is how the three-eleven program and Airbus end up meshing. They are theoretically very similar aircraft, and given previous success TTL I don't see rolling the program into a European program as terribly likely (especially given how the programs interacted OTL), but at the same time the tail engined twin widebody has potentially serious operating problems. If BAC ends up moving the engines to the wings it becomes an almost exact duplication of the A300, something that will be very obvious as the program goes on. If we assume the French don't drop the Airbus without British participation (and they didn't OTL when the British walked out) I wonder if the three-eleven might be cancelled VERY with an agreement to establish Concorde like dual production lines and use engines meant for the three-eleven on the Airbus.
If both the three-eleven and A300 end up in service it's going to be ugly. I could speculate on the outcome of the programs, but ultimately I suspect the core story is going to be destructive competition and neither aircraft being profitable. In the long run things definitely look better for Airbus than the Brits given the issues a very large tail engined platform is likely to have and the multiple partners associated with Airbus. That said, with the HS.134 having short circuited the A320 program the big short term loser is probably Lockheed finding the Tristar shut out of Europe (although that could also be a good thing, between the ability to gives Rolls Royce the boot and focus on longer range versions earlier) while the European commercial industry as a whole is probably going to be a bloodbath, with a lot of good products without a market. OTOH that kind of incentive to discount orders is what got Airbus into North America in the first place... If you were up for absolutely wankish levels of optimism I could almost see the early approval of both the 134 and three-eleven either scaring the French off from launching the A300 altogether or more likely turning it into an ultimately purely French project that ends up resembling the Mercure and ends up with the French industry track record looking a lot more like OTL's British than their own.
In terms of the overall premise though, my take is that no, the Comet wouldn't have been in any way a failure without the crashes. Certainly it would have been "fleeting" as OP put it, but frankly that was par for the course in that era. The aircraft would have been more common than OTL though, and would have only done good for British aerospace. In essence I think a Comet without OTL's disasters makes completion of the V-1000 almost a certainty. How successful that program is will have much more bearing on the long term future of the British industry than the Comet at that point. That said, yes, all the structural issues, terrible decision making and bad habits of the British industry still exist and I suspect most likely you've just delayed the ultimate decline of the industry a few years. That said, I tend to think that the V-1000 design was pretty well solidified when it was cancelled OTL, and I don't think there were any glaring issues. Yes, it had buried engines, and was generally going to be problematic to stretch, but so was the 707. I suspect from what little I have seen that it would have actually been truly on par with the 707 in just about every way, with the real question being one of marketing, pricing and production speed (likely to combine in terrible ways and seriously limit the number actually built).
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