In 1948 Nevil Shute published his novel No Highway. Appropriately for a novelist who was also a trained aircraft engineer, it is a thriller whose story concerns the fortunes of a new transatlantic airliner, the Rutland Reindeer, which turns out to have a metal fatigue problem. A boffin at RAE Farnborough has an entire tail section of the aircraft, covered with strain gauges, up on a test rig that vibrates it around the clock to simulate normal cruising flight. According to his newest calculations the front spar of the tailplane could fail without warning after 1,440 hours’ flying. A Reindeer has already disappeared over Labrador with forty passengers but since the wreck is inaccessible it has never been investigated to establish the cause of the crash. It is now beginning to seem highly significant that the aircraft already had 1,393 hours’ flying time. Should the entire Reindeer fleet be pre-emptively grounded, with dire consequences for the Rutland Aircraft Company and the airline, not to mention the risk of Britain losing its slice of the transatlantic route? An additional muddying factor is that it looks as though the boffin, Mr Honey, is also interested in pyramidology. But need this apparent evidence of nuttiness in private life invalidate his professional conclusions as a structural engineer?

Assuming No Highway was written the year before it was published, the story pre-dated the Comet 1’s maiden flight by two years, and Shute’s foreshadowing of the Comet accidents of 1954 seems almost uncanny. As a thriller it reveals the extent to which the safety issues of long-distance passenger flights were both popularly understood and debated. Its publication year also happened to mark the mysterious disappearance of the British South American Airways’ Avro Tudor Star Tiger somewhere near Bermuda with thirty-one passengers and crew. The Tudor was a typical British post-war stopgap airliner: a derivation of the Lincoln bomber with the same wings but a new pressurised fuselage. As a passenger aircraft it was dreadful, right down to the very name with its absurd aura of half-timbering and National Trust. Even its designer, Roy Chadwick, who had shaped the brilliant Lancaster and Lincoln bombers, was at a loss to explain quite why the Tudor was so bad. The final irony is that it killed him. In August 1947 he took off from Manchester’s Ringway Airport in a Tudor with Avro’s chief test pilot Bill Thorn at the controls and the aircraft abruptly nosed over and plunged into the ground, killing them both. It turned out that this was not due to a design fault but to an elementary maintenance mistake caused by a careless mechanic who had crossed over two control cables (which in turn suggests that Thorn might have skimped his pre-flight checklist). This did nothing to shift a feeling that the Tudor was jinxed as a passenger aircraft, even if it went on to give good service flying cargoes in the Berlin airlift.

In the BBC Radio 4 series Inside the Bermuda Triangle, broadcast in 2009, former BSAA pilots Peter Duffey, Don Mackintosh and Gordon Store were interviewed and testified to design faults in the Tudor so elementary and so gross that it seems a misnomer to call them ‘faults’ at all – a word that can imply unfortunate oversight as opposed to reckless indifference. Gordon Store admitted that he had never had any confidence in the arrangement of the Tudor’s Merlin engines. ‘Its systems were hopeless … All the hydraulics, the air-conditioning equipment and the recycling fans were crammed together underneath the floor without any thought. There were fuel-burning heaters that would never work.’ That heating system, as Don Mackintosh said, ‘bled aviation fuel [i.e. 100-octane spirit] on to a hot tube – and was also fairly close to the hydraulic pipes’. It is now thought likely that Star Tiger and its sister Star Ariel (which vanished in the same area a year later) might either have run out of fuel well short of Bermuda or else have gone down in flames. It was these disappearances that helped give rise to the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ myth. One final accident sealed the type’s fate when in 1950 a Tudor V, Star Girl, crashed on landing at Llandow in South Wales. A veteran of the Berlin airlift, it was returning, packed with triumphant rugby supporters, from Belfast where the Welsh team had just won their eighth Triple Crown. Out of seventy-eight passengers and five crew only three supporters survived. The loss of eighty lives was the worst civil air disaster to date.*

The point here is the contrast between the fictional Reindeer and the factual Tudor. Shute writes in his Author’s Note: ‘The scrupulous and painstaking investigation of accidents is the key to all safety in the air, and demands the services of men of the very highest quality. If my story underlines this point, it will have served a useful purpose.’ It would be too easy to excuse the Tudor’s shortcomings by saying, well, the aircraft had been designed a year before the war ended; in those days London– Bermuda with a refuelling stop in the Azores was right at the limits of almost any commercial aircraft’s range; and standards were anyway a bit rougher-and-readier then. Yet once BOAC had swallowed up BSAA its extreme reluctance to accept that airline’s Tudor fleet – understandably preferring tried-and-tested American DC-4s and suchlike – made it clear that even in those days passenger aircraft were expected to be reliable and safe as well as economical, just as Shute’s novel implied. Moreover, it was widely understood that any failures would be rigorously investigated by real-life Farnborough boffins. The public in 1948 may have been more phlegmatic about flying in general, especially when faced with extreme weather conditions, but that didn’t mean passengers easily accepted they might die if they flew. Any airline hoping to capture a share of the profitable transatlantic market understood very well the trade-off between spending for greater safety and the penalties for gambling with people’s lives.

Even discounting safety issues, Britain’s approach to gaining a foothold in post-war commercial aviation was strangely muddled and half-cocked from the start. The United States held a near-monopoly on modern long-distance passenger aircraft, partly from having to deal with its own vast continent but also because it had been able to go on developing them throughout the war. That Brabazon and his committee – not to mention politicians like Churchill – should have taken it for granted that Britain ought to challenge this superiority indicated hubris as much as it did serious consideration of the economics involved and the chances of real money-making success. By 1943 one hardly needed to be psychic to predict that once hostilities had ceased Britain, with its war debts to pay off, its huge overseas empire to maintain and its own partly ruined cities to rebuild, was going to be dangerously short of money. It might have occurred to these patriotic gentlemen that it would be judicious to abandon to their vastly wealthier ally a field of aviation in which they already lagged far behind, while they concentrated on maintaining their own genuine lead in jet-fighter technology. The task of building competitive commercial aircraft was formidable. Nor was it just a matter of retooling Britain’s war machine to build civil aircraft: the industry would have to change its entire attitude, especially where safety was concerned.

The Comet’s failure to live up to its revolutionary promise, while lamentable, was not completely surprising. Despite de Havilland’s care and attention to detail – and in terms of progressive engineering the company at the time was probably the closest of all British aero firms in spirit and practice to an American counterpart – the Comet still went into service when it was ‘nothing like a hundred per cent aeroplane’. Although as we have seen this was not an uncommon practice with British military aircraft, and the same companies were building both military and commercial models, it is still to be wondered at. Even at airline level the instinctive reaction to disaster was to close ranks. Thirty-seven hours after the first crash Sir Miles Thomas, BOAC’s chairman, temporarily suspended all Comet flights ‘as a measure of prudence’ to enable ‘minute and unhurried technical examination of every aircraft in the Comet fleet to be carried out at London Airport’. But then BOAC rather spoilt the effect by announcing that its chairman’s decision was ‘based on a desire to retain the good name of the Comet’.1 One might have expected him to have valued his passengers’ lives over an aircraft’s reputation, at least in public.

The attitude of some companies towards the proper way to build and test an airliner intended for mass airline sales was wrong. After all, with the exception of possible export sales military aircraft were not designed primarily to be an economic success. So long as their performance specifications were met and the government’s cheques rolled in on time, the companies responsible for them had little incentive to consider their aircraft from an economic viewpoint. Issues such as fuel consumption, let alone noise levels, never came into the equation. Nor was safety always of the paramount importance the companies ritually claimed. As we know, extraordinary risks were taken with barely airworthy prototypes such as the Javelin being rushed into the air to meet some financial deadline, while operational RAF squadrons kept their stocks of black sealing wax constantly replenished.

Such habits were precisely the wrong ones for any company to bring to its commercial designs. So also were production practices that Bill Waterton had dismissed as being more typical of ‘back-alley garages’. His was by no means a lone voice, especially among people who had travelled or worked abroad and had seen how differently things were done elsewhere. By 1953 the Canadian-born Beverley Shenstone, the aerodynamicist who had helped design the Spitfire’s elliptical wings in the mid-thirties, was British European Airways’ chief engineer. At a conference that year he was outspoken:

It was to be hoped that this sort of lackadaisical crudeness was the exception rather than the rule. But the real blame for what blighted several potentially great British commercial aircraft lay far more at the level of management. After all, they had the power to change shop-floor practices overnight had they really wanted to.

What also seems incomprehensible today is the creaking slowness that attended virtually every step of Britain’s aircraft production and anything else to do with aviation. Consider, for instance, the post-war development of Heathrow. In 1946 what had been Fairey’s Great Western Aerodrome was demilitarised and reborn as the fledgling London Airport. From the beginning it was billed as ‘the world’s largest airport and the country’s biggest post-war building scheme’, and was clearly intended as the flagship civil facility for a rapidly growing peacetime aviation industry. Within seven years it was handling a million passengers annually, even though these unfortunates still had to troop in all weathers through a series of tents instead of a terminal. As befitted a true-blue New Elizabethan plane-spotter, my bookshelf contained a copy of London Airport: The official story of the new world air centre (HMSO, 1956). The pretext for this glossy booklet, halfway between a photo-essay and a guide, was the opening of the Queen’s Building by Her Majesty in December 1955. It illustrates the airport’s new amenities (project architect: Sir Frederick Gibberd) as well as constituting not very subtle propaganda for the British aircraft industry. However, amid all the flag-waving for this supposedly state-of-the-art ‘world air centre’, there is conspicuously not a single mention anywhere of a rail link even as a future project. Passengers either arrive ‘by airline coach from the Air Terminal in London’ or else ‘independently’ – meaning also by the pre-motorway, traffic-clogged ‘Great South-West Road’.†

Many of London Airport’s pages carry photographs of aircraft taking off or landing, or else merely sketched in a maintenance hangar. Otherwise they are shown standing outside the new terminal building (not many passengers were bussed to their flight in those days. Most simply walked a few yards out to the aircraft from the terminal door). The great majority are Vickers Viscounts or Bristol Britannias. This is not surprising, given that by then the Viscount was the mainstay of BEA’s fleet and Bristol’s new airliner would, it hoped, shortly become the same for BOAC on its long-distance routes. In addition, there are glimpses of some triple-finned, twin-engined Airspeed Ambassadors. These excellent aircraft were built by the company Nevil Shute had co-founded and were named ‘Elizabethan Class’ by BEA in honour of the new Queen. (It was one of these, G-ALZU, that crashed with the Manchester United team in Munich.) Also identifiable in these pictures are several non-British aircraft: BEA DC-3s, for instance; a Quantas Super Constellation, a BOAC Boeing 377 Stratocruiser with its distinctive ‘double bubble’ fuselage and one of Sabena’s twin-engined Convair Metropolitans. But the overall impression is of a predominance of all-British airliners on their home ground. That this was intentional is clear from the first page, where readers are urged to ‘fly British by BEA or BOAC’. Beneath a Union Jack waving across the top of the page are photos of a Viscount and a Britannia with the rhetorical question ‘2 of a kind?’ answered immediately by the text below:

Exactly what kind of service is presumably illustrated on the inside cover opposite, a colour painting of a stewardess offering a bronzed and beaming first-class passenger a chromed salver on which there rests a packet of cigarettes (‘You asked for Benson & Hedges cigarettes, Sir’). The stewardess is obsequiously inclined like a dutiful butler. Her blue military-style uniform with flap pockets makes her look like a WAAF whose duty it recently was to bring officers their tea as they planned that night’s raid on Bremerhaven. Behind her is a view of the cloudscape beneath the aircraft’s port wing through a plate glass window of a size more suited to a railway carriage, fancifully at variance with the comparatively small windows in aircraft of the period.

Among the other things one notices about this booklet’s glimpse of the future Heathrow is that all the aircraft depicted are propeller-driven. The Viscounts and Britannias simply suggest the dominance of the new generation of British turboprop engines over the conventional American piston-engined Stratocruisers and Super Constellations. There is no sign of a jet aircraft anywhere. The Boeing 707 was then still more than two years away from PanAm’s inaugural New York–London flight in October 1958. Above all, there is no mention of the Comet: a sadly suggestive absence. Had this booklet been published three years earlier it would have been stuffed with seductive pictures of the world’s first jet airliner, each one captioned with drum-banging prose. But the Comet was grounded and London Airport in 1956 had fallen out of the Jet Age, even though the turboprop Viscounts and Britannias were leaving behind them that new, reassuringly futuristic reek of burnt kerosene.

The Viscount was a lovely little airliner. Maybe after all it justified British hubris in taking on the United States at their own game. It was the first of a small but impressive handful of first-rate passenger aircraft the post-war British industry managed to produce. Certainly it was the only one that was a commercial success and paid its way – nearly 450 being built and sold around the world to sixty different operators. The others all fell victim to the British disease of becoming hopelessly delayed and arriving too late to make the commercial impact they deserved. The Viscount began as yet another response to the Brabazon Committee’s wartime call for a medium-haul aircraft to challenge the foreseen American monopoly of commercial aviation after hostilities ended. One result was Airspeed’s conventionally powered Elizabethan; the other was Vickers’s turboprop Viscount. In its early development the Viscount prototype was known as the Viceroy; but after India’s independence in 1947 it was obvious that this would not do. Vickers, set on coming up with suitably noble names beginning with ‘V’, clearly hadn’t seen that ‘Viceroy’ might embarrassingly echo Louis Mountbatten’s newly defunct title. Flicking through the dictionary to find a substitute they came up with ‘Viscount’. This represented several ranks’ demotion in the nobility stakes and was still not a great choice because no one had reckoned on Americans being unable to pronounce it. When the first Viscounts were sold to the US, Capital Airlines had to issue their staff with stickers saying ‘PRONOUNCED VI-COUNT’.3

The Viscount was the world’s first turboprop-powered passenger aircraft, and it brilliantly challenged the American hegemony by being faster, smoother, quieter and more economical than all comparable US commercial aircraft of the period. It quickly made a name for itself by exemplifying the advantages of the new turbine-driven engines that represented a sort of halfway stage between the old piston engine and a full-blown jet. Because these engines ran on kerosene rather than aviation spirit they offered a greatly reduced fire hazard. To realise its turboprops’ full economic advantage the Viscount cruised best at 25,000 ft or slightly higher, which required a properly pressurised cabin. This was more expensive to manufacture but well worth it in terms of fuel economy as well as passenger comfort because the Viscount could usually fly above the worst of the weather. The smoothness of its flight was frequently demonstrated by passengers eager to test advertisers’ claims by using their seat-back tables to balance coins on their edges.

My first journey in a BEA Viscount in 1959 (for ludicrous and foredoomed amatory reasons) was from what had by then become Heathrow. My flight to Gibraltar was also my first in a turboprop aircraft. From its earliest appearance I had been captivated by the aircraft’s neat looks. I liked the tailplanes’ steep dihedral and I also very much liked the styling around the cockpit that seemed to tuck it between little streamlined cheeks. What appealed above all was the slimness of the four engine nacelles protruding far in front of the wings’ leading edges. Here were no clunky great Wasp radials of the American airliners but slender Rolls-Royce Darts resembling jets with four-bladed propellers. Before going aboard I ducked beneath the wing and peered into the sooty ovals from which the turbines’ hot gases would stream: jet orifices of a sort and reeking of paraffin-fuelled power. A Viscount of an earlier flight had started up and taken off with that thrilling sound – by now familiar from a dozen air shows – of the Darts’ rising whine, eventually settling to a muffled scream chopped into fragments by the whirling propellers: the auditory equivalent of strobe lighting. My seat was over the starboard wing and I had an excellent view of the long polished nacelles and the ground crews’ NO STEP warnings stencilled in black on the unpainted metal wing.

I watched start-up entranced, seeing how the propellers’ flickering arcs changed their shade of grey as the pitch of the blades altered from ‘feather’ through ‘coarse’ to ‘fine’. The doors thudded shut, cutting off the engines’ shrill frequencies. The old magic of that childhood Dragon Rapide flight returned, where everything involved in flying seemed to shine with a lacquer of significance and become exceptional. The miracle of inducing transparent air to support thirty-three tons of metal and fuel and flesh as though they were feathers coated each humble piece of hardware involved and even lent a mystique to the ground crewman pulling the yellow starboard chock clear and walking off, dragging it behind him, before turning to give the all-clear signal to the pilot. Even the blind rivets on the wing were a source of fascination as we taxied out to the end of the runway, turned with a blast from the two outside engines and went straight into take-off with a surge of full power that brought a rush of excitement. (How naive this all sounds half a century later, when many people fly more frequently than they travel by bus, and with scarcely a thought for their commonplace conveyances!) Even at that time the Viscount’s extraordinary smoothness was becoming old hat to seasoned travellers, for by now the big transatlantic jets like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 were in regular service, not to mention the Comet 4, and passengers were beginning to take for granted the smoothness of jet-powered flight. Today, nobody any longer remarks on it because they have never experienced the vibration and din of piston-engined aircraft. The Viscount had offered relief from this as early as 1950 when it entered service with BEA. It is not surprising that it sold around the world as a mainstay short-and medium-route workhorse. Even by 1956 it had earned Vickers approximately £62.5 million in exports, equivalent to some £1.25 billion at today’s values, of which £40 million came from dollar orders.4 It continued in service with BEA well after that airline and BOAC had merged in 1974 to form British Airways, flying until 1985 when the fleet was sold to charter operators. One or two Viscounts are believed still to be flying regularly in Africa. It was Britain’s most successful commercial aircraft and its clean elegance can turn heads at air shows even today.

 *

The aircraft that was intended to be even more successful was the Bristol Britannia. After the Brabazon’s failure Bristol were pinning their hopes on its more realistically sized successor to capture much the same long-distance market as the Comet, but with the much greater fuel economy offered by turboprops. The public had first seen the Britannia when ‘Bill’ Pegg, Bristol’s chief test pilot, showed the prototype somewhat gingerly at Farnborough in 1952, not long after Geoffrey Tyson had performed with the massive Princess flying boat. Pegg was cautious because although he had first flown G-ALBO nearly thirteen months previously, it had been plagued with landing-gear problems, the last of which had occurred only a fortnight before the SBAC show. On the day, G-ALBO performed perfectly. It was already painted in BOAC’s colours in honour of its launch customer and its great white tail fin with the Union Jack decal on the rudder gave a great impression of calm steadiness of purpose. (The huge rudder was at least partly intended to counteract any sideways swing if an outboard engine failed.)

Seventeen months later in February 1954 Pegg had a less satisfactory flight in the second prototype, G-ALRX. The landing-gear problems had long been solved but the new Proteus engines had given a good deal of trouble although this, too, seemed to have been overcome. On board that day were eleven others, including some heavyweight observers. Among them were Stanley Hooker, Bristol Engine Division’s celebrated chief engineer; the Britannia’s chief designer, Archibald Russell; and representatives from a keen potential airline customer, KLM. That morning Pegg lifted G-ALRX smoothly off Filton’s long runway and headed north towards Herefordshire. They were still climbing when after seven minutes the oil temperature of no. 3 engine rose alarmingly and Pegg shut it down, ostensibly to demonstrate to his Dutch colleague (who was co-pilot in the right-hand seat) that the Britannia could climb perfectly well on three engines.

After a while the oil temperature in no. 3 was back to normal so Pegg restarted it and climbed through 10,000 ft when without warning there was a loud explosion in the same engine and almost immediately the fire warning light came on and the alarm sounded. In swift movements he at once pulled back that engine’s green-topped throttle lever before he reached over to the Engine Fire Control panel and flicked no. 3’s vertical row of toggle switches down: alarm, fire doors shut, oil cocks shut, low-pressure fuel off, high-pressure fuel off. The co-pilot looked back through the window and reported fire, and at that moment Archibald Russell appeared on the flight deck to report a ‘hell of a fire’ in no. 3 with flames streaming back as far as the tail. In fact what had happened was that the reduction gear in that engine had stripped its cogs. Nearly all propeller aero-engines needed a system of fixed gearing to reduce the speed of the propeller. This was because the speed at which the engine was designed to run most efficiently would, if it drove the propeller directly, turn it much too fast (at only a little over 1,800 rpm the tips of a 12-foot diameter propeller reach the speed of sound, which is not only intolerably noisy but very inefficient). Hence the Britannia’s Proteus engines incorporated reduction gearing immediately behind the propeller. On this occasion a fault had caused these cogs to shatter, destroying the drive to the propeller, and the suddenly unburdened no. 3 engine had raced itself to destruction, sending a shrapnel-like burst of hot metal fragments into the oil tank which had promptly ignited. The engine’s extinguisher system seemed to be having no effect on the fire. Suddenly, this was a critical situation. They were at 10,000 ft with a raging fire in a wing that contained 2,000 gallons of fuel. Pegg shut down no. 4 engine as well and now had to take a quick decision on which twelve lives would depend. Should he try to return to Filton or attempt a crash landing? They were now over the Welsh mountains, so this last hardly seemed an option. He turned back on a Bristol heading but in everybody’s mind was the knowledge that with the slipstream fanning the fire to white heat it was only a matter of time before the starboard wing’s main spar began to soften and the entire wing folded up. If that happened the aircraft and all aboard her were doomed. There would be zero hope of recovery or survival.

Descending rapidly and with Bristol in sight, Pegg could see the Severn’s mud flats glinting in the morning sun and realised that the tide was out. He immediately opted for a crash landing on the mud. With only the two port Proteus engines keeping the aircraft in the air, the advantage of the Britannia’s big rudder in maintaining the aircraft’s steerability became apparent. He was just lining up for a 200 mph wheels-up landing on the mud somewhere south of Sharpness when without warning even these two engines stopped. Worse still, Pegg calculated that the aircraft would now hit the ground at exactly the point where the channel of a small river cut across the beach into the estuary, probably deep enough to flip the Britannia on to its back or send them cartwheeling across the flats in flames. Working frantically, the two Bristol engine technicians on the flight deck managed to reignite both port Proteuses and at the last moment the Britannia regained enough flying speed to avoid falling like a sack of dumbbells. Shouting to everyone to brace, Pegg brought the aircraft with flames and thick black smoke trailing from its starboard wing down on its belly in the glistening mud to a flawless crash landing. G-ALRX slid 400 yards with uncanny smoothness until the last moment when it turned abruptly right towards the sea and stopped. With yet another stroke of luck the mud seemed to have put the fire out and the entire party was able to scramble out uninjured before wading through the silt to safety. It was a tribute not only to first-rate piloting but to an immensely strong airframe.

Gradually the Britannia surmounted its problems so that by 1956 my London Airport booklet boasts a confident, full-page advertisement for ‘The Whispering Giant’. Above a night photo of G-ANBJ on the tarmac the copy reads: ‘The Bristol Britannia is the largest and most advanced airliner flying. Capable of carrying up to 133 passengers with all the smoothness, comfort and quietness associated with turbined-powered [sic] flight, this eighty ton aircraft cruises at 400 mph over ranges from 6000 down to 200 miles more economically than any other airliner.’ An insider’s view of this aircraft’s development, as of the company that built it, was given by Sir Peter Masefield, who had been running BEA before joining Bristol Aircraft as their managing director at almost the exact moment this advertiser’s copy was being written. It is instructive because it reveals much about the way in which the chances of the Britannia’s success – like those of so many other British aircraft of the period – were squandered. Masefield was a highly experienced pilot before he was a businessman, and had no-nonsense views to match.

Almost as soon as he had sat down in his office he fell foul of the clannish way in which this family-run business operated. Thereafter there were frequent rows whenever he made any sort of public announcement without first clearing it with the directors. Worse, the business procedures he had put in place to run BEA profitably were clearly all wrong for Bristol. ‘I was made to understand that [the company] was a place for gentlemen, who were above such things as balance sheets.’5 Being above such things as balance sheets was not likely to prove a successful way to run a business enterprise, and so it proved at Bristol despite the company having some excellent designers, brilliant engine builders, and an impressive list of (far too many) projects including military aircraft, helicopters and guided missiles. Almost as soon as he had accepted the post at Bristol Masefield was offered the managing directorship of BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, the national carrier on routes outside Europe. Had he taken the job British civil aviation might have developed along more rational lines. But he honoured – with some misgivings – his prior decision because it was ‘a challenge’. This challenge was, in mid-1955, to make Bristol’s turboprop Britannia competitive with first-generation US jet airliners such as Boeing’s new 707 (which was even then being test flown) and Douglas’s DC-8, both of which could cruise at least 100 mph faster than the British aircraft while carrying more passengers. To make things still more difficult Masefield was up against the awful slowness that pervaded Britain’s aviation industry and which among Bristol’s board had, in his own words, now attained a state of ‘abysmal lethargy’. The Britannia’s development had been dawdling along for eight years already and it still had not overcome its engine problems. ‘All that this great aeroplane needed was engineering manpower,’ Masefield lamented, ‘[but] from the start it had suffered from a total absence of the American spirit which simply trampled problems to death, usually in hours. At Bristol, problems simmered for months.’6

So far as the Britannia’s engine problems were concerned, these had been simmering for years. The engines were Bristol’s own Proteus turboprops, originally designed for the second version of the Brabazon, which had been broken up in 1953 with fewer than 400 flying hours and not a single customer, leaving behind as its two useful memorials at Filton a gigantic purpose-built hangar and the lengthened runway. The Brabazon had cost Bristol some £3.4 million to develop (over £73 million today) and the new Proteus engine must have looked like the only thing of value that might be salvaged from the entire project. Ten of them were already installed in the Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat in a complicated coupled arrangement that had already caused hideous engineering problems. By 1955 the engine was still giving trouble. Like Masefield, Bristol Engine Division’s chief engineer, the great Stanley Hooker, was outspoken about the regime he served:

(This heavy lunching seems to have been standard practice at managerial level in much of the industry in those days, and even considerably later – we shall be meeting it again. Presumably the High Table or club ambience reminded the ‘gentlemen’ directors of their Oxbridge days and softened the indignity of having to think of themselves as industrialists or even – God forbid – ‘in trade’. It was part of a nineteenth-century mindset that proved so disastrous to Britain in the competitive high-tech world of supersonics and mass travel.) The specific problem with the Britannia’s Proteus engine that Hooker had to solve was an over-complex reverse-flow system that derived from its having been designed for the Brabazon and the Princess, both extremely large aircraft. Had he known they would be cancelled he might have simplified the engine’s design, thereby avoiding the persistent icing problems the engine encountered that were to delay the Britannia’s entry into service by a further two years.

Yet even that delay could have been avoided had BOAC really wished. Back in 1949 the airline had contracted to buy twenty-five Britannias, but since then it had constantly changed its mind about the number of passengers it expected them to carry, wavering between sixty-four and eighty-three, the upper figure of which required design changes that made the aircraft nearly five and a half tons heavier and threw out all Bristol’s engineering and pricing calculations. It was true that BOAC found itself in an awkward position. It was Britain’s major national carrier, and as such was expected to fly British aircraft for which it effectively paid subsidised prices; but it made no bones about wishing it could buy American even though the government had no dollars to spare. At the time this was decried by some as grossly unpatriotic, but with hindsight a case could be made in BOAC’s favour for having decided early on that American domination of the commercial aviation scene was in the long run inevitable and unbeatable, and that it would much rather fly a uniform fleet of Boeings (or Douglases or Lockheeds) than a mixed bag of American and British aircraft, with the added complication and expense of different spares, equipment and qualified mechanics, all to be replicated worldwide.

The icing problem in the Proteus engines was not, in fact, very serious. It occurred only in easily avoided circumstances and Hooker engineered a series of remedies, any one of which worked reliably. It was thus not a major safety factor. But BOAC deliberately exploited the situation, announcing it in public as a deadly hazard – an extraordinary thing for any airline to do with an aircraft it was contracted to buy. Masefield was exasperated.

In the meantime Hooker and Bristol Engine Division had come up with a superb new turboprop engine, the Orion, which when installed in a Super Britannia would give it a much higher cruising speed of 470 mph for the same range. ‘It was obvious’, Masefield wrote with new assurance, ‘that we could compete with the 707 and the DC-8.’ Given that the American jets could cruise over 100 mph faster with a larger payload, this seems optimistic to the point of wilful stupidity. It is hard to accept it as the considered position of a man who was not only an experienced pilot but a proven expert on the business of commercial aviation who had turned BEA’s fortunes around. In 1956 he took the tenth production Britannia, G-ANBJ (the very aircraft photographed for London Airport), on a world sales tour, doing much of the flying himself. It aroused considerable interest even in the US. He entered into serious negotiations with Eastern Airlines, and then later with TWA, whose eccentric president, Howard Hughes, test-flew the Britannia himself impressively well, having first removed his shoes. Yet both sales prospects foundered once it became clear that Bristol couldn’t meet the orders by the dates required. The company lacked the capacity for mass production. Eventually, a total of eighty-seven Britannias was built, a mere fraction of what might have been. In 1957 one of Duncan Sandys’s many cost-cutting measures was to stop supporting the Orion’s development. This killed an engine of extraordinary promise stone dead, and with it all hope of a Super Britannia.

The Britannia’s history is tragic in its revelation of how an excellent aircraft’s prospects were steadily killed off by managerial and political incompetence. The aircraft’s appearance in the advertisements and illustrations of the London Airport booklet of 1956 has an aura of retrospective melancholy, for even then the Whispering Giant was doomed to be superseded by the new American transatlantic jets within two years. Even so, it still became the first aircraft ever to carry 100 passengers non-stop both ways across the Atlantic, and it could fly non-stop from Tel Aviv to New York. It looked good, too: for such a large airliner it had extraordinarily graceful lines. There was no dihedral at all on any of the flying surfaces: together with its huge square-topped tail fin, everything contributed to an overall impression of flatness. If this flatness promised exceptional stability, other features suggested the Britannia was swift as well. The Proteus engines were comparatively slender, like the Viscount’s much smaller Darts; they were also slightly staggered, the two outboard engines being set a little behind the inboard. This was because the leading edge of the wing had a distinct degree of sweepback, especially compared with its four-motor propeller-driven Douglas and Boeing contemporaries. The Britannia’s linearity was increased by its narrow nose and rakishly paned cockpit. In its white-top BOAC ‘Speedbird’ livery with the wings and underside left as polished metal it gave off an air of eager capability. Despite the insuperable handicap of its late arrival, this fondly remembered aircraft still saw respectable service with several airlines as well as with RAF Transport Command, the last examples disappearing in the eighties. It also afforded me one of the more memorable flights of a travelling lifetime when in 1968 I was offered a free trip to Hong Kong aboard a Lloyd International Airways cargo Britannia out of Stansted.

I and four others had been instructed to drive on to the airfield by a back gate and go straight to the aircraft out on the pan. In those days Stansted was a lot smaller and so informal that there was no one at the gate to ask, so we had to drive around the flight line a bit before we identified our particular aircraft. We wandered up the steps and introduced ourselves to the affable crew (all ex-RAF), who were busy with pre-flight checklists and lading manifests. We soon discovered there were no seats: the entire fuselage was stuffed with bales of cotton material. The deal was that we were to fly out to Hong Kong where there would be a three-day turn-round, in which time the city’s sweatshops would convert our cotton bales into thousands of pairs of knickers for Marks & Spencer. These would then be reloaded and we would return to the UK. Just before we took off somebody remembered to ask whether we had brought our passports with us, otherwise ‘the chaps in Honkers might get a bit stroppy’. We wedged ourselves on top of the bales in the four-foot crawlway beneath the top of the fuselage and so began our sedate passage to the other side of the world.

It was extremely comfortable, lying Princess-and-pea-style atop a vast bed of cotton six feet deep; but the journey seemed to drag even though we made good time at a steady 400 mph. We ate ageing British Rail-type sandwiches that curled more the further east we flew. Occasionally we crawled down towards the tail where there was a sort of cupboard with an Elsan chemical toilet bolted to the floor. We made refuelling stops at airfields like Dum Dum outside Calcutta where the Indian authorities obliged us to disembark but would not allow us to leave the aircraft’s shade. We cowered from the sun beneath a wing while the fuel bowsers mustered with their leaky hoses. The puddles of kerosene spread until by the time we finally re-embarked our shoes were reeking with AVTUR (aviation turbine fuel). This wait gave me plenty of opportunity to examine the aircraft’s landing gear at leisure and otherwise poke and pry, dabbing drops of hydraulic fluid from concealed nipples with my fingers and smelling them. Since the Britannia was an altogether larger and taller aircraft than the Viscount I couldn’t sniff at the Proteus exhausts because the jet effluxes vented well out of reach, above the wings’ trailing edges rather than below.

The somewhat bored crew were wonderfully indulgent of my curiosity, and from Dum Dum onwards I spent most of the journey in the cockpit, which with its quilted roof seemed both luxurious and businesslike. Trying not to sound like a twelve-year-old, I plied them with endless questions which they seemed happy to answer, as if pleased to find a fellow enthusiast. Particularly at night, the ‘office’ felt like a natural home: the bright constellations overhead, the orderly rows of unwinking panel lights, the long introspective silence above the engines’ unwavering hum and the radio officer’s occasional muttered conversations behind us as he spoke to traffic controllers somewhere in the void beneath. At the time, the man in the right-hand seat had control and he eased back a little on the control column with its distinctive horn-type grips like a splayed-out ‘M’. We gained some more altitude before asking for and getting permission to overfly South Vietnam, in that year of the Tet Offensive an intense war zone. We watched the wandering lightning flashes of a tropical storm silently pooling in hectic pearlescent patches under the roof of clouds far below us and it was easy to pretend that a great battle was raging on the ground. And in due course, long after sunrise, I was allowed to perch on the jump seat behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats when landing at Kai Tak (‘If you’re going to lurch forward, for Christ’s sake don’t bang these throttles, OK? We’d be a bit buggered’). Thus I was afforded an unforgettable airman’s view of the hair-raisingly steep approach over high-rise buildings, a last-minute right-angled turn before touchdown, full reverse on the propellers and braking to a smoking halt a few yards short of the South China Sea.

Three days later the pilots, much the worse for floozies and drink, yawningly seated themselves once more and took off, rotating rather too abruptly and banging the underside of the tail on the tarmac (‘Oh, well done, Geoff. I bet that’s spilt the sodding Elsan’). Back at Dum Dum for our first fuel stop we checked for damage but there was nothing beyond some scraped aluminium skin. Those were the days when flying was still an adventure, informal and friendly enough to afford huge and unexpected pleasures. By the end of the week I had a working knowledge of the Britannia’s cockpit layout and had been instructed how to wind on flaps or trim, to start and stop the engines, lower and raise the undercarriage and steer the nose wheel using the recessed tiller by the pilot’s left hand. All unbeknownst to me then, fate had scheduled me to begin flying lessons in Manaus, Brazil, later that year; but those two thirty-six-hour Lloyd International flights in the Britannia afforded me almost as much instruction and pure enjoyment as finally getting my hands on some real live controls. What madeleines once did for Proust would today be done for me by the scent of fresh cotton knickers and AVTUR, with maybe just a hint of Elsan fluid.

Peter Masefield was still managing director at Bristol when Duncan Sandys’s White Paper was published in 1957. He was every bit as scandalised by its consequences for commercial aircraft as were the military pilots left glumly surveying the prospect of the RAF’s disbanding in favour of guided missiles. ‘Thanks to Government (i.e. Sandys) policy, we were entering a long period of Cloud-cuckoo-land in which virtually the entire energy of the Boards of the British aircraft companies was devoted to organising partnerships … In effect, the world-class British aircraft industry was being deliberately destroyed.’9 Good rousing stuff; except that where making commercial aircraft was concerned the British aircraft industry was manifestly not world class, although as we know it was quite capable of coming up with an occasional aircraft that would potentially have been world class had it not been for the foot-dragging incompetence of its own manufacturers, the mulish resistance of the nation’s major airline, and the whimsical mutability of government policy. Of the fifty or so different British civil aircraft designs that actually managed to reach production, all but half a dozen were never built in significant figures; and with the sole exception of the Viscount even those figures were nothing like significant enough to save the industry.

The sort of thing a potential world-class airliner was up against in Britain can be seen in the case of Vickers’s successor project to the Viscount, the V.1000. In 1951 the Air Ministry had issued specifications for a long-range strategic transport for the RAF to replace their fleet of propeller-driven Handley Page Hastings. Since the new transport would have to service the needs of Britain’s V-bombers then under development and which might be deployed anywhere around the world, it was made clear that it would have to be jet-powered, capable of at least 600 mph and with great range. One of the money-saving stipulations was that it must be based on an existing airframe. All four V-bomber manufacturers (Shorts, Vickers, Handley Page and Avro) came up with variations of their warplanes, while de Havilland offered a stretched version of the Comet. Of the designs submitted, the one by Vickers was chosen: a much larger development of the Valiant with a good few changes, especially to the tail. In 1953 a contract was signed for a single prototype. So far, so good.

Meanwhile, it was obvious that this new transport could easily be configured for commercial use to become the world’s first really big jetliner for the North Atlantic and Empire routes. Soon, BOAC was taking part in detailed planning for a civil version which would be known as the VC 7. This aircraft would seat 100 passengers six abreast. Once the prototype V.1000 had flown the VC 7 could follow swiftly on. By the end of 1955 the first V.1000 under construction at Vickers’s Wisley plant was within months of completion when BOAC decided that its increasing weight would require the Rolls-Royce Conway engines to be uprated and concluded this wasn’t feasible. Simultaneously the RAF’s budget was drastically cut and on reconsideration it concluded it would have to forgo its new jet transport after all and make do instead with militarised versions of the Comet and the Britannia. It pulled out of the project and BOAC promptly followed suit, a ministerial spokesman saying the airline was ‘satisfied that it can hold its own commercially on the North Atlantic route until well into the sixties with the Comet 4 and the long-range Britannia’.10 That November the V.1000 was cancelled, and with it the VC 7. Incredibly, less than a year later the House of Commons was informed that permission had been given for BOAC to buy fifteen Boeing 707s costing £44 million ‘in order that the Corporation may hold their competitive position on the North Atlantic route from 1959 to the 1960s. At that time no suitable new British aircraft can be made available for that purpose.’11

In keeping with ruthless tradition, the unfinished prototype in Wisley’s hangar was broken up and all the jigs destroyed. George Edwards, Vickers’s brilliant chief designer who had produced the Viscount and the Valiant and whose baby the V.1000 was, commented grimly, ‘It’s no use leaving a corpse about for the chaps to mourn over.’ The realpolitik of British aviation. BOAC’s extraordinary volte-face was made all the more grotesque when it turned out that the Boeing 707s it had ordered were to be powered by uprated Conways, the very engine it had said couldn’t be developed to power the VC 7. Such was the end of what had promised to be the first-ever jet airliner capable of flying the Atlantic non-stop with a payload of 100 passengers, and all a good two years before its potential American rivals. Later, George Edwards described the whole miserable affair as ‘the biggest blunder of all’. He would say that, wouldn’t he, given that he had designed the aircraft; but it’s hard to disagree. The way the entire matter was handled, right from the MoD’s issue of an Operational Requirement through to BOAC’s calculated duplicity, typified the way one of Britain’s truly great and inventive aircraft companies could be reduced to a pawn in a game played offstage by Civil Service advisers, government ministers, Treasury officials and the airlines. By the end Vickers were left having to abort the new baby taking shape in their sheds and deal with a suddenly bereft and discouraged workforce. It was clear that, despite its initial public enthusiasm for the VC 7, BOAC was always likely to be swayed by its pro-American faction, and so it proved. Their case was too strong, able as they were to point to the not-yet-flown Comet 4 and the slow-selling Britannia – both of which aircraft they had contracted to buy. Having to add the still-unbuilt VC 7 was too much, so they turned and ran in the only direction they had ever really wanted to go.

The airline’s behaviour was even more peculiar because they must have known perfectly well that while the Boeing 707 was excellent for the transatlantic route, it was less suited to the difficult ‘hot-and-high’ airfields of East Africa, the Far East and elsewhere. American airliners were designed for the very long runways typical of their spacious native land. Most couldn’t operate from comparatively short strips, least of all where the air was hot and thin and afforded less lift. As the national carrier, BOAC had quite a few hot-and-high airports on its so-called Empire routes and in 1957, barely a year after summarily rejecting the V.1000, it shamelessly returned to Weybridge to suggest Vickers now build them a new long-range high-performance jet airliner with ‘hot-and-high’ capability. By then Vickers were coming to the end of building Valiants and were beginning to worry about having enough work in the future. This new airliner, BOAC explained, would be a private venture – meaning that it would be a big financial risk for Vickers. Not only would the order be small, but after its recent treatment by the airline Vickers placed little faith in its word, especially as there would be no financial backing from the government. Yet despite everything they went ahead, and the VC 10 was born.

The trick to getting a large airliner to unstick from short tropical runways or land on them at a slow enough speed was to have masses of power and nothing but flaps and slats at the wings’ trailing edges to ensure lift. The question then became, where to hang the engines? Ever since the Boeing B-47 jet bomber of the late forties, American designers had pioneered hanging the engines on pods beneath the wings. There was obviously a penalty in drag and it could sometimes slightly restrict the control surfaces at the wings’ trailing edges, but none of this mattered too much as long as there was plenty of runway available. But being sited low, podded engines have the disadvantage that they more easily pick up any stones or other debris on a runway, with potentially disastrous results. (This is known in the trade as FOD or ‘foreign object damage’.) And hot-and-high airfields in the more far-flung parts of Africa and the Far East often had runways that between flights – which might not even occur daily – were home to herds of goats and were played on by school-children, so could be littered with all sorts of rubbish. In due course podded engines became the basic configuration for practically all big American jets, from the B-52 to the 707 to the 747 ‘Jumbo’ and beyond. Today, most airports have goat-free runways of ample length, which partly explains why this type of design, though aesthetically clumsy, has become standard in both Boeings and Airbus aircraft (a further reason being that podded engines are the most accessible for servicing). But back in 1957 Vickers decided that for good reliable hot-and-high performance it needed an aircraft with clean wings, maximum control surfaces and high-mounted engines. So when George Edwards drew the VC 10 he hung the four Rolls-Royce Conways at the back, as the French had so enterprisingly pioneered with their much smaller twin-jet Caravelle.

Over the next few years the project encountered all too familiar setbacks. As usual, BOAC kept changing their mind about both the specifications and the number of aircraft they wanted to order, and things only began to look better for Vickers when the RAF began taking an interest in the VC 10 as the fast, long-range transport they still needed. When Jock Bryce and Brian Trubshaw took the prototype up on its maiden flight in June 1962 they did it from Brooklands, whose runway was a mere 1,300 yards long. This was sheer chutzpah on its designer’s part. Edwards later remarked, ‘Everybody thought I was bonkers to make a first flight with a big new-style aeroplane like that out of a little saucer of an aerodrome like Brooklands.’12 But he knew he had designed what was then the most powerful airliner in the world, and he knew it had real short-field performance, and he was right. It flew beautifully, taking off and landing at speeds well over 20 mph slower than a Boeing 707.

In its testing over the next year the VC 10 met with and overcame some initial stalling and drag problems before going into service with BOAC in 1963, becoming instantly popular with both pilots and passengers – the latter particularly liking the quietness associated with having the engines at the back. It was a beautiful aircraft to look at, with its long slender nose and big fin topped by sculpted, almost windswept tailplanes headed by the characteristic ‘bullet’ fairing containing such things as the instrument landing system aerials. In its BOAC livery it looked outstandingly elegant with its clean, uncluttered wings, making a sharp aesthetic contrast with the 707s and DC-8s bristling with engine pods. (Probably the only aircraft that has ever managed to make jet pods look sleekly part of the overall design was Convair’s snazzy fifties delta bomber, the B-58 Hustler.) What was more, the VC 10 was soon getting higher payloads than its American rivals. But this seemed to cut no ice with BOAC’s new chairman, Sir Giles Guthrie. Reverting to type, he suddenly decided to convert the airline back to an all-American fleet. He cut the order for thirty Super VC 10s to seven, then cancelled the lot. His air-line’s original stipulations about range and take-off distance had produced an aircraft that had a higher seat-to-mile cost than the 707; but this would always have been true. In aircraft design, as elsewhere, there’s always a price attached to increased performance. Yet again history repeated itself as BOAC ‘orchestrated a campaign against the VC 10’. As George Edwards once more bitterly observed, ‘if you couldn’t sell [an aircraft] to your own airline the chance of selling it outside wasn’t very great … It was a sorry story. The whole relationship between BOAC and the industry at that time was bloody awful and did the industry a power of no good.’13 To add further irony, it turned out that in the long run the comparatively few VC 10s that flew proved more profitable than the Boeing 707. Charles Gardner summed it up: ‘So the Super VC 10, denigrated in advance by BOAC as too expensive to operate economically – and for which they obtained some £30 million in subsidy as recompense – turned out to be actually cheaper to fly than the 707 and also to attract more passengers.’14

Even so, the business of attracting passengers did depend on the airline having done its market research. When I first flew on a BOAC VC 10 to Tripoli in 1965 the aircraft was full. A few of us disembarked – perhaps twenty-five – and as far as I remember we seemed to be replaced by others for the next leg of the journey to somewhere like Khartoum. But a few years later I boarded a British Caledonian VC 10 in Recife, Brazil, bound for London Gatwick. I remember BCal fondly as a thoroughly splendid air-line to fly with, but on this route they can’t have done their sums too well because I was one of only eleven passengers rattling around in this large aircraft. (This must have been before 1972 because in that year BCal replaced its four VC 10s on the South American run with Boeing 707s.) It was a night flight, and I remember the other passengers as elderly and falling asleep as soon as our dinner had been served. After that I went forward through a desert of empty seat rows to a galley to chat with the air hostesses in their tartan finery, and bit by bit wangled an invitation on to the flight deck.

Thereafter I spent almost the entire flight in the cockpit, avid as ever for technical detail. Once again the crew seemed to be ex-RAF and only too happy to indulge me. One thing made enough impression for me to have already described it elsewhere.15 VC 10s carried a navigator who sat behind the pilots on the right in a sideways-placed seat at a work station facing its own oval window. Ours had been getting regular radio fixes from Dakar and Cape Verde far ahead in the darkness. Somewhere in mid-Atlantic he stood up and opened a panel in the cockpit roof. Here there was a valve-like aperture through which he thrust a periscope sextant and shot the stars to confirm our position. ‘We like to make sure,’ he explained. ‘Back-up, really. Radio fixes are fine but it’s nice to get confirmation from a completely different source.’ The entire flight seems to me now to have been enchanted (youth and that); but some of that quality must derive from the way it encapsulated so much that has vanished – BCal, for a start, as well as those relaxed days before the world surrendered to abject paranoia about terrorism and it was still possible for a passenger to pass the night chatting in an airliner’s cockpit. Nowadays, of course, airliners no longer carry navigators: the last went out with the VC 10 and the Boeing 707. Navigation is all done via satellites using GPS. Most aircrew have probably never seen a sextant, let alone know how to use one. As in so many other fields, we have become completely reliant on a single technology. If for any reason (foreseen – such as a burst of intense solar activity – or else unforeseeable) the GPS system is put out of action for any length of time, it will be interesting to know how many of the hundreds of pilots simultaneously in the air all over the world manage to revert successfully to old-fashioned compass bearings and dead reckoning to get them back to earth. A few may even resort to following major roads and railways, like their open-cockpit counterparts a century ago. Old skills becoming extinct are somehow more lamentable, although less poignant, than the passing of splendid aircraft like the VC 10.

The aircraft surely had its faults. Its Conway engines were the world’s first by-pass jet engines to go into service and they were thirsty and noisy. Although it was quiet for passengers, all of whom sat ahead of the engines, the VC 10 would not qualify to operate out of today’s major airports, nearly all of which have noise restrictions. But then it is getting on for fifty years old, although still looking as elegant and fresh as on its first roll-out. When it first flew it was a tour de force of design, particularly in its flight-control system and cockpit technology. For its December 2003 issue Aeroplane polled hundreds of pilots and listed their top ten most ‘pilot-thrilling’ aircraft. The VC 10 came top, beating even the F-86 Sabre into second place. (The list is also interesting for including the Hurricane and not the Spitfire. The Hurricane is ranked no. 8, ahead of the P-51 Mustang at no. 9, the list being completed by the Lancaster – surely the most biddable bomber ever to fly.) As though to confirm the point, the story is told of the Vickers test pilot Desmond ‘Dizzy’ Addicott having to ferry a VC 10 back from America in the sixties. It was empty but for its crew. Somewhere over the Atlantic on a whim Addicott instructed his colleagues on the flight deck to hang on and promptly barrel-rolled it. Unfortunately he had forgotten about the stewardesses down in the aft galley, who were alarmed to glimpse the ocean rear up and soar overhead before descending on the other side, now rather nearer. It must have been one of the later examples of old-fashioned aviator’s exuberance in a supposedly staid and graceful airliner. It was one thing for Roly Falk to roll a Vulcan – it was, after all, a solid delta-shaped mass of muscle. But to roll an airliner the size of the VC 10 showed not only high spirits but total faith in the capabilities of the designer and company the pilot worked for.

Anybody over the age of about forty-five who wishes to make a pilgrimage should forget Lourdes and go to Brize Nortoninstead, where 101 Squadron can supply occasional apparitions of a genuine miracle. The squadron flies the last VC 10s, and will do so for a handful of years yet. The Ageing Elizabethan by the fence on Station Road at the end of Runway Two-Six may be lucky enough to see one of these pale ghosts taxi out towards him and turn on to the numbers. Then the four Conways open up and all forty tons of thrust thunder back over the blast pads’ yellow chevrons. Revelling once more in the friendly incense of burnt kerosene and hearing again that ripping crackle of sound is to fall prey to a deep nostalgia. Yet the sonic drubbing also bullies out a kind of unashamed pride: that this still-glamorous example of British engineering genius is not only flying today but will soon rack up half a century of service. The sight of the Conways’ splendidly flagrant carbon footprints disappearing into the grey cloud base while still battering Oxfordshire with their exuberant decibels – a sound so vigorous it can surely only be youthful – carries mournful overtones nevertheless. As with the Bruntingthorpe Vulcan, it speaks so eloquently of everything this nation could so recently do, and of the men who so bravely and brilliantly did it in a time that has gone, and which can only come back to us now in waves fading on the wind. 

Notes – Chapter 8: ‘A power of no good’

1 Quoted in T. Hewat and W. A. Waterton, The Comet Riddle (Frederick Muller, 1955), p. 14.

2 Quoted in Till Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War (Ashgate, 2004), p. 174.

3 Peter Masefield and Bill Gunston, Flight Path (Airlife, 2002), p. 213.

4 See House of Commons Debates, 20 December 1955, Hansard, vol. 547, col. 301W (Written Answer from Frederick Erroll).

5Masefield and Gunston, op. cit., p. 238.

6 Ibid., p. 246.

7 Stanley Hooker, Not Much of an Engineer (Airlife, 2002), p. 128.

8 Masefield and Gunston, op. cit., p. 250.

9 Ibid., p. 257.

10 Robert Gardner, From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde (Sutton, 2006), p. 116.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 136.

13 Ibid., p. 137.

14 Ibid., p. 138.

15 See James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven Tenths (Faber, 2007), p. 272.

* It is strange and unjust that this appalling accident is virtually forgotten today, while the Munich air crash of 1958 with its far fewer fatalities (seven Manchester United footballers and fourteen others) is endlessly referred to, memorialised almost with relish, and may yet become the subject of a Hollywood film. Possibly this merely reflects Rugby Union’s inferior popular status.

† It seems inconceivable that it should have taken over thirty years to build any sort of rail link between London’s nearest, most prestigious, airport and the city centre. Yet it did; and even that was merely a spur added to the Underground’s Piccadilly Line, with frequent stops, opened in late 1977. A dedicated Heathrow Express railway line to Paddington was inaugurated only in 1998, over half a century after this ever-expanding ‘great world travel centre’ had first opened for business.