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It isn’t easy being first. After all, there’s a reason why we’re all carrying iPhones or Androids and not an IBM Simon. And when’s the last time you checked your MySpace? The first people who develop a groundbreaking idea might prove its merit, but they also inherit most of the problems, risks, and setbacks that come along with it. The same can definitely be said for the de Havilland Aircraft Company Limited’s DH-106 Comet 1, the first-ever passenger jet airliner.
On paper, the De Havilland DH-106 Comet 1 was quite the impressive airplane when it first rolled off the assembly line in 1949. While it wasn’t the first airplane with a pressurized cabin (that accolade belongs to the Boeing 307 Stratoliner), the Comet was the first to have an operational ceiling of more than 40,000 feet, which was a full 10,000 feet higher than the previous record holder, the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
That extra 10,000 feet helped the De Havilland DH-106 Comet 1 get the most out of the real star of the show—the Ghost 50 Mark I jet engines built into its wing structure. Those engines, which were eventually replaced by the Rolls-Royce Avon, allowed the Comet to fly higher and faster than the competition could. The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), the predecessor of British Airways, received 9 Comets and the model flew its first commercial flight on May 2, 1952. But exactly one year later, the problems set in, and as is often the case in aviation, these problems had deadly consequences.
On May 2, 1953, BOAC flight 783 left Calcutta, India, on a flight to Delhi. With 43 passengers and crew onboard, the airplane encountered severe rain and thunderstorms and experienced a mid-flight break-up, exploding into a giant fireball, killing everyone on board. Initially, investigators blamed the accident on stresses caused by the severe storm, rather than a fault in the aircraft design itself. But within the next year, the glaring problems with the Comet’s design became all too apparent.
On January 10, 1954, a BOAC flight from Rome similarly climbed to 27,000 feet before breaking up and crashing into the Mediterranean Sea near the island of Elba. Three months later, another Comet, this one operated by South African Airways, also broke apart mid-flight on its way to Cairo, killing all passengers and crew. With this third crash in less than a year, the U.K.’s Air Ministry grounded all Comet aircraft and called for a thorough investigation, a process that involved fully submerging a Comet fuselage underwater to test its performance at pressures similar to those experienced at high altitudes.
With the arrival of the Comet 4 in 1958, which sported rounded windows instead of the square-ish ones found on the Comet 4, a misunderstanding grew that it was the windows that caused irreparable stress on the airframe, which led to the series of midflight breakups. However, this is likely a misunderstanding, as the investigation into the three accidents by the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation found that the cutouts for Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) antennas on the top of the aircraft were to blame, but were described in the report as “windows.” In reality, the Comet 1 arrived at a time when engineers didn’t have a nuanced understanding of metal fatigue, especially as it related to pressurized cabins.
Although de Havilland did address all these issues with the subsequent Comet 4 four years later, the Boeing 707 arrived just a month later after that model’s debut. And soon the Comet—and its record-setting design—faded into aviation history.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
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