The Comet Story
Background
The deHaviland Comet was the jet liner that almost made history. In the aftermath of World War II the United States dominated the passenger liner market. The one advantage the British had in this period was their experience with jet engines. The result was to use this to their advantage and ambitiously build the worlds first jetliner, the deHaviland Comet. Being the first ever jetliner to enter operational service, it quickly became extremely popular. Their was no comparision between the Comet and the noisy propliners of its time. The Comet was quite smooth and fast, and could fly over the top of the bad weather that the propliners had to fly through.
The Disasters
After its introduction in 1952 everything went smoothly for the first year, but it wasn't to last. In 1953, one year after its first commercial flights, things started to go wrong. Throughout 1953 their were three Comet crashes which combined started to affect the publics confidence in the plane. But in 1954 the final blow was delt, on the 10th of January BOAC Flight 781 disintigrated and dropped into the ocean in a fire ball, twenty minutes after takeoff. The Comet fleet was grounded while a frantic investigation took place, but the investigators had little to work on, and consequently were mainly guessing as to what the cause was. The result of this investigation was about 50 modifications to all existing Comets, which kept the fleet grounded for two months.
However, later in the year, after the modifications had been made, it happended again, this time with a South African Airways Comet. The result of this was the grounding of the Comet fleet (again) while engineers did all they could to see what the problem was. It was eventually determined by simulating pressurasation and depresurisation by a Comet airframe on the ground that after only 9,000 hours of simulated flying, the airframe showed significant cracks in the metal skin. The cause? It was the Comets square windows and hatches that caused the cracks which lead to the explosion on the two Comets that exploded mid air.
The Aftermath
The results of this discovery were far reaching, while it was a fixable problem and later versions of the Comet had rounded windows to prevent this fatigue problem, the faith in the Comet was gone and the delay in operations gave deHaviland's American cometitors enough time to regain the head start deHaviland had gained. For deHaviland it was a blow that they never recovered from and now
