Ah, the British Leyland Effect - merging a successful company with a failing company on the understanding that the successful one will obviously drag the failing one up rather than the failing drag down the successful. Oh and the government will look askance at any attempt at rationalisation or closures, never mind how the unions will react. What could possibly go wrong? Not that the managers were exactly blameless either.Slight diversion: Norton motorcycles used the same bushings to mount the engine on Commando motorcycles to isolate vibration. The government "urged" Norton to merge with BSA motorcycles, which was bankrupting, to rationalize the bike industry, so Norton became bankrupt too.
I don't believe so, in large part because they didn't carry as extreme a test programme as after the crashes in large part because they didn't know to look for the problem. IIRC de Havilland had something of a reputation at the time of pushing the envelope and cutting corners. This could be seen in that according to one account I read the cockpit cabin floor near the door noticeably flexed ever so slightly if the plane was turned/banked above a certain rate or that the skin on the nose flexed and made a loud bang when the aircraft passed a certain high speed. Realistically someone should have sat down and come to the realisation that these were not good omens and needed serious looking into. I actually used it as a point of divergence several years back in a proposed timeline by having a BOAC employee be along on a test flight and notice leading to one hell of a row and changes being made.As a matter of interest - with the Comet was there a realistic chance of finding the problems before the crashes with the test regimes/equipment of the day (if done properly)?
The shame is that the Comet failed due to a combination of using a too thin gauge metal skin, the shape of the windows, and a construction decision. The gauge of the skin was thinned to save weight since de Havilland wanted to use their own engines but they weren't powerful enough to make the desired range, whilst in the original design plans the windows had been rounded and drilled riveting and glued windows construction mandated rather than the more square windows and punch riveting that was actually used for some reason. If de Havilland either swallowed their pride, or more likely were forced, to use alternate engines and stick to the original plans then whilst it would probably be maybe twelve months delay any aircraft failures would potentially happen later and be across all the different manufacturers aircraft since they wouldn't be able to learn from the Comet disasters.
Sure, we know that now with hindsight. IIRC as an example when Dunlop closed one of their factories in Liverpool I believe it was that had been losing large sums of money year on year even after restructurings they not only got protests from the unions and locals but even the city's Anglican and Catholic bishops waded in making statements using language along the lines of it being wicked or immoral to close down a site that employed so many people. Other examples were the use of government Industrial Development Certificates to force businesses to build any major new factories in depressed areas which saw companies like Rootes having to build one in Linwood 250 miles away from their other ones. After WWII with its heavy use of central planning a large number of people were convinced that it was the way to go in peacetime as well.Given how government directed mergers shafted both the aircraft and motor industries I doubt a utopian approach of awarding the best and biggest firms with the contracts and letting the market deal with the rest would produce a worse result.