Rationalize the British Aircraft Industry

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.
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.


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)?
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.

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.


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.
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.
 
My assessment is no, not really. It would, however, be reasonable to have the actual design flaws be avoided entirely. Problem is, as I mentioned above, it was likely to happen to someone at some point, and DH was more likely than most to be the victim. That said, any version of modified windows, thicker skin or a factory following design specifications on riveting (drilling rather than punching) would have avoided the disasters.
Yeah, the thing is not finding the problem before the first crash, but finding it before the second one, because it was the second one that did the real damage to the Comet's reputation.
 
Yeah, the thing is not finding the problem before the first crash, but finding it before the second one, because it was the second one that did the real damage to the Comet's reputation.

I don't know how much that would actually help, let alone how it could happen. There really wasn't all that much pointing to fatigue without reference to hindsight, and keeping the aircraft grounded long term really wasn't a serious option while there was only the single accident. At the same time, the nature of the issue was that the aircraft were not really repairable. Note that not even the Comet IIIs were seen as being able to enter service, and the ones that were used militarily were never authorized for full pressurization; it would seem that the original skin was too compromised after riveting to be at all viable. The accidents themselves hurt, but the delays and loss of sales mean more for the industry imo, and avoiding the crashes doesn't fix that.

It's also worth noting that at least one airline, CP, had already been scared off, dropping the Comet after their first airframe was involved in one of the OTHER crashes, caused by it's rather unforgiving low speed handling (though some sources suggest they intended to still take their Comet IIIs and had merely dropped the I, which was always going to be an interim aircraft in the Pacific).
 
Yeah, but what really killed their reputation was the second crash. If they could have sorted it out before that one, the reputation of the Comet would have been much less damaged.
 
As far as the Clyde goes, it played the resonant harmonica, and played it bad enough to break things. The Centaurus was lacking in power and altitude capability. Centaurus shook too, but metalastic mounts took care of it, except on Brabazon, which used coupled Centaurus.

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.

That's a pity. I had the impression that Lord Hives decision to cancel the the Clyde was one of the greatest mistakes made in the history of post war British aviation.

E.g. the Westland engineers said if they had been running the company they would have insisted on the Wyvern with Clyde engines or no Wyvern at all. Though based on what Just Leo wrote it may have been a reflection on how bad they thought the AS Python was not how good they thought the Clyde was.

Yet another myth busted.
 
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