Aviation History:- The false dawn of jet travel: The early Comets

The demise of most of the Nimrod (based on a 1960s Comet 4C fuselage) fleet is a good moment to look at some of the orginal Comet history.

First flown on July 27th 1949 when BA predecessor BOAC's fleet comprised piston engined aircraft, of which the Avro York and Solent flying boats were unpressurised , the Comet 1 was revolutionary and far ahead of anything else in the sky. Remarkably for a British airliner of its time and bearing in mind that everything about it was new including its speed, cruising height and operating proceedures, it was delivered much to schedule and introduced into service on the London-Rome-Beirut,-Khartoum-Entebbe (Nairobi Eastleigh at 6,000 + feet was too high and its runways were too short)-Livingstone-Johannesburg route on 2nd May 1952. Its initial operations were highly successful and the network quickly expanded to reach Singapore, Columbo and Tokyo, the latter via Manila as Hong Kong Kai Tak was too constrained by hills and runway length).

BOAC's original order had been for 14 Comet 1s and 6 Comet 2s, the latter with a marginally lengthened fuselage and more powerful Rolls Royce Avon engines replacing the De Havilland Ghosts. This was ammended to 8 Comet 1s and 12 Comet 2s , with the first 2s scheduled for delivery in April 1954.All 8 Comet 1s were delivered by 31st March 1953. In that year De Havilland also finalised plans for the Comet 3, later to be the Comet 4. BOAC's board authorised the purchase of 6, subject to guarantees about suitability for North Atlantic operations.Pan American also ordered 6 and a number of other airlines including Air India were interested. Qantas were unimpressed despite a lot of political pressure from the UK.

The optimum payload range of all 3 versions was remarkably limited, which meant multiple short sectors and the loss of some of the jet's speed advantages as well as higher costs. The figures were:

Comet 1 1,200 miles
Comet 2 1,950 miles
Comet 3 2,150 miles.

The operational learning curve was steep and there was one early loss near Calcutta, then a major BOAC station, in May 1953 during storm assosciated turbulence.

The end of the Comet 1 and 2 commercial era,- came with the loss of G-ALYP en route from Rome to London near Elba on 10th January 1954 followed on 8th April by another near Naples while operating a South African Airways service. All Comet 1s, including those operated by Air France, UAT of France and Canadian Pacific were immediately grounded and neither they nor the Comet 2, the first two of which were on the point of delivery to BOAC, flew again as carriers of paying passengers. BOAC did in fact take delivery of the two Comet 2s which became 2Es and used them for route development and training . The remainder of the 2s, went to the RAF where they were successfully used for passenger carrying though with customers who had no choice. The Royal Canadian Air Force also used two modified Comet 1Es for troop carrying.

There was then a four year gap in commercial passenger jet operations until 4th October 1958 when the first of 18 BOAC Comet 4's entered service on the London-New York route, shortly followed by the much larger 120 seats plus future-defining initial short fuselage version of Boeing 707.

Despite the recent RAF grounding and very swift destruction of most of the Nimrod fleet, a very few of the surveillance version remain in service alongside the 707-derived AWACS aircraft so the basic but much modified and strengthened 1947 Comet airframe isn't quite dead yet, but the writing must be on the wall even for them.