There was a curious paradox at play in the tale of BOAC and its VC10 story. On the one hand BOAC dictated what they needed and wanted, and yet when presented with their desire, criticised it publicly, only then to launch the chosen instrument with a massive global advertising and PR campaign across fifty countries (including Times Square in New York) the likes of which airline customers and passengers alike, had not previously seen.
In the early 1960s, BOAC had even commissioned the writing of its own corporate history and employed a respected figure to research and frame the BOAC story. Speedbird the Complete Story of BOAC was brilliantly written by Robin Higham and constituted the most thorough and forensic telling of the events that shaped BOAC – albeit mostly from BOAC’s viewpoint.1 Yet it was not ever published as intended, and it took the author twenty-six years to see the book in print by other means. This was because successive BOAC leaders vetoed or delayed its publication. Such were the political issues, legacies and personalities that had created the story. It seems incredible that a corporate body – albeit a nationalised one, then privatised, should apparently suppress the telling of its own story. But as we now know, there were things best veneered over in case the wretched public found out.
Before all that happened, shifting sands were at play – as ever in the political and corporate world.
The British Overseas Airways Corporation, originally correctly shortened as B.O.A.C., but latterly framed as BOAC (yet seemingly never, Boac, unlike QANTAS becoming termed as Qantas), was, like most official corporations, a melange of issues and agendas. On the positive side there was vision, strength and employee ‘family’ pride in working for a great national entity. On the negative side there were management hierarchies, egos, vested interests and agendas, there was also a confusing mixture of outcomes of corporate decisions made by committees and their compromises of thinking and behaviour. BOAC’s early board all had to face the issue of interference from the State and its Civil Service political puppets. All of which meant, that by 1958, BOAC was like a car designed and funded by a committee – a disjointed amalgam of legacies and ideas that was going to need help, or it might fail to proceed.
Proof positive of this actuality, was the aircraft fleet mix operated by the company and the greatly multiplied costs inherent within such equipment and its operation. BOAC then compounded the problem by ordering the 707 and the VC10 amid a fleet of Comet 4s; turbine-powered, but propeller-driven Bristol Britannias; piston-powered Douglas DC-7Cs, Handley Page Hermes and remnants of other ‘stop-gap’ machines. BOAC’s ageing fleet of Lockheed Constellation, Douglas DC7 and Boeing 377 Stratocruiser equipment, that were often four-engined upon departure and three-engined upon arrival, amid their massive associated operating costs, would slowly be withdrawn as their operating advances were undermined by progress in design and the demands of new airways across the world. Yet, in even in 1955, the prop-versus-jet quandary had still not been resolved by BOAC’s managing board.
Post-war BOAC retained large flying boat operations until 1950 – even as it was entering the Comet 1 jet age. Indeed, BOAC spent money on new flying boats – the Solent Class – and on a base and Terminal at Southampton, where, on 31 March 1948, the Sandringham Class flying boat, G-AJMZ Perth, alighted with twentyone passengers on a service from Iwakuni, Japan. This was a significant long-haul achievement that few airlines could match. BOAC was rightly proud of its postwar continuation of the large flying boat service, but in just a few years, the large flying boat would be forgotten by the world’s airlines and by BOAC itself, despite some British minds insisting that spending the money developing the Saunders Roe SR 33 ‘Princess’ was a viable 1950s strategy.
BOAC purchased three Boeing 314 Clipper flying boats from Pan American Airways, these were not part of the wartime lease-lend mechanism and BOAC purchased them for cash. These giant Boeings, as the first Seattle company machines procured by the airline, had to be serviced back in America at Baltimore after every few flights on the West African service. It was an expensive and risky undertaking, but highly successful.
A joint Imperial Airways and ‘Qantas Empire Airways’ (QEA) – as a Qantas corporate subset designed to service the link the two ends of the UK-Australia route from hubs at Singapore and Brisbane – was founded in 1934 with Imperial and Qantas owning 50/50 shares in the venture.
At Rose Bay in Sydney, the Imperial/QEA services would terminate the flying boat route from London. QEA (Brisbane) S23 C Class flying boats would operate a reliable shuttle service for nearly four years prior to the outbreak of war, and continue through wartime events until the late 1940s. Rose Bay would see QEA lose two C Class machines in crashes in two months, in October and November 1944, when the S23, VH-ABB Coolangatta, crashed on 11 October and S33, VHACD, which was lost on 18 November. Rose Bay was not a happy little cove that month.
The real roots of BOAC’s long-haul network surely stem from the Imperial Airways HP 42/43 and Shorts S23 C Class flying boat operations. From those wonderful days when routes were carved out of soil and sky to Africa, Asia, and beyond, came the BOAC network that Constellations, Comets and then VC10s would ply. There, the die for our modern services was cast. Today, few travellers realise that the ‘everyday’ airline services were carved out by pioneers in the toughest flying conditions.
From as early as 1940, BOAC inherited the old Imperial Airways legacy of being an airline and a national instrument of policy, prestige and delivery of colonial mail and rule, under a government framed ‘State’ remit, this meant that BOAC was a beast with several personalities and perhaps even with disorders. In 1943, BOAC’s second chairman was The Hon. Clive Pearson, who wrote to the Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair to try and define exactly what was BOAC’s real remit? Was it to create its own airline service, or was it to follow specific government edicts? BOAC after all, could not take private, commercial decisions, yet as a paradox, was not a direct instrument of what, at the time, was called ‘Service of the Crown’. Would the Air Ministry be a thorn in BOAC’s side or a back room supporter? Who really was in charge?
In 1943, BOAC also had to operate had-in-hand with the new RAF Transport Command and ignore opportunities to build up its own experience as an actual airline – in the knowledge that the American airlines were working to frame all possible opportunities as soon as the war ended. In America, civil aviation dominated military transport aviation. Whereas in Britain, the RAF dominated what had been Imperial’s civil operations as they became wartime BOAC affairs. In March 1943, such was the confusion over BOAC’s operating remit that its chairman and its three senior directors all resigned. A new board was announced which included two interesting appointments, one being the head of the retail grocers, Marks and Spencer, the other being the leader of the National Union of Railwaymen. However, a viscount of the realm, Viscount Knollys, was appointed as BOAC’s new chairman. It was a strange selection for the non-airline and airminded people; the focus was on finance and set themes, and perhaps not on making the most of the hard won wartime operational experience that BOAC had already accrued. Inside BOAC were men (and women) who had rare airline operating experience on a global route network, yet these employees were now to be commanded by a group of figures emanating from the hierarchical British class and social structures stemming from a pre-war era. There was little operational airline experience at the top of the new board and senior management – although one member had helped run the wartime ATA ferry pilots organisation – but that person was a woman! Something of a shock to the all-male ‘old guard’.
Such were the issues facing BOAC and its structure.
But there were men of huge experience within BOAC, who, as they rose through the ranks, guided the day-to-day operations of the airline’s vast network. Men like Ross Stainton, who began his career with Imperial Airways in 1933 as a lowly trainee station officer in Africa. He ended it as a senior BOAC figure and, as ‘Sir’ Ross, having proudly turned BOAC’s operations and cabin services into the highest class Blue-Riband product, even more so on the Super VC10 services which were recognised as the highest quality offering in the market at the time. Once again the VC10 would be touched by the hand of Imperial. Another BOAC luminary who emerged from early days at Imperial Airways was Campbell Orde. Such men were steeped in ‘air’ experience. Whatever the prejudices of the Imperial or British attitude, there were men amongst its ranks who performed amazing, sometimes incredible feats, and led lives of service and utter professionalism. Further names of men like O.P. Jones, J. Kelly Rogers, G.H. Easton and many more abound.
In 1945, the government created a new Air Minister in the form of Major General Ernest Lord Swinton, who then created the Swinton Plan for BOAC’s post-war operations. As part of this, BOAC would lose some of the routes that it had built up in wartime. These routes would be handed over to new start-up airlines.
BOAC was a nationalised mechanism that began its true peacetime life in 1946 – as a result of decisions taken in 1939 when the services of Imperial Airways were absorbed into the war machine. By 1945, BOAC emerged from its early wartime years rich in experience, but cash-poor, and operating a bizarre and expensive fleet mix with a huge costs base. BOAC had seven types of seaplane or flying boat, and ten types of landplane. Most of these machines, except the American DC-3, were uneconomical to operate. Other airlines were also securing proper, economically effective airliners. BOAC would have to abandon flying boats and cobbled-up converted airframes and get hold of some ‘proper’ airliners surely?2
BOAC needed a strategic, defined, and informed policy as an airline business. But such policy was a long time coming.
In 1946, the new Civil Air Transport Act under a new Labour Government and a new Air Minister, Lord Winster (who had succeeded Lord Swinton), created the nationalised airline transport structure. BOAC soon received a British Government grant of just over nine million pounds – a staggering sum given that Britain was bankrupt after six years of war. By 1951–1952, BOAC’s State funding had declined to £1.5million. BOAC moved towards commercial solvency and did not, for some years, need to take up its grants. But the truth was that BOAC was a symbol of sovereignty and power in a waning world of British influence and a declining Empire. By 1959, BOAC employed 20,000+ and had a route network approaching 100,000 miles serving six continents with hundreds of daily departures. Soon, with the VC10, BOAC would offer an unbroken, BOAC operated round-the-world service.
In 1946, the brilliant Air Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman framed the domestic and intra-European British airline that was itself a corporation – British European Airways Corporation, known as BEA. Lord Douglas of Kirtleside was BEA’s first chairman. He had been co-pilot on the Handley Page Transport Ltd ‘airline’ flight of 2 September 1919, he had also held British commercial pilots licence No.4. In 1940 he contributed to the plan of the Second World War.
There were many links between the two corporations post-1946, yet Caribbean and South American services from Britain were originally given to British Latin American Airlines Ltd, which changed its name to British South American Airways (BSAA). BSAA, with its unfortunate fleet of unlucky Lancastrians and Tudor airliners, was an airline soon to be subsumed into the great power that was BOAC itself. But it would be 1958 before BOAC resumed a direct link from London to South America – an often forgotten part of the BOAC and VC10 stories.
BOAC, like London Heathrow Airport itself, was a state-within-a-state and strong leadership was required. Even at its start, its fleet was old, mixed, hopelessly uneconomic and largely inefficient. In 1948 BOAC had forty-seven overseas bases or stations, and operated ten types of landplane and seven types of seaplane, each with their own training, maintenance, crew, and route costs.
A Question of Class
Post-1945, the old elitist days of First Class only travel would be swept aside. ‘Tourist’ or Second Class travel at high speed on long routes would become the great demand – and those within British aviation and the ‘White Paper’ that framed BOAC’s remit, predicted such.
As an instrument of British national will, by government edict, BOAC had to use the national exchequer to fund its operations – irrespective of profit or loss. Interest, fees, airframe amortisation, fuel, fleet, crew and staff costs presented an accounting nightmare within the multi-layered behemoth of BOAC. Workforce and management were also both mired in previously established behavioural psychologies. Change and change management would come to BOAC at the expense of time and money. BOAC was founded with finance that was a State loan and indeed, it had paid that loan back by late 1955. But from 1956 the costs of fleet re-equipment, the delays of the Comet disasters and postponed introduction of the Britannia, the costs of interim measures, all allied to other mounting global operating costs, meant, that by 1957, BOAC needed money. This arrived in the form of government-sanctioned monies that were at the behest of a minister – who may or may not have any knowledge of business or airline transport affairs, especially if he was a lowly MP elevated to a position of temporary ministerial power. BOAC was a Treasury funded machine, or if your politics were different, a monster of a corporation.
Yet unlike many other major world airlines, who were members of bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) or the International Airline Transport Association (IATA), BOAC had a government appointed management team led from a ministerial and governmental edict at Ministry of Transport (latterly Ministry of Aviation) behest, and handed down to a board – the leadership or Chairmanship of which was appointed by government itself. Then came another managing director and a subset of directors beneath that station. BOAC was, in 1939, Britain’s first nationalised major industrial concern (long before the railways) and despite later claims in Parliament that the running of such industries on a day-to-day basis could not be subject to interventions from MPs of the House of Commons, the truth was that the management of the airline, the accounting procedures and the strategic decisions of the airline, were influenced by, and often set by, government itself.
In 1949, faced with the need to work with the overseas airlines of newly independent or emerging nations (through which Imperial’s and thus BOAC’s route had run pre-war), an act of Parliament to create BOAC Associated Companies Ltd, was passed. This allowed BOAC to work with, and invest in, smaller foreign airlines – creating the forerunner of partner deals and code share agreements, but above all, creating local ‘feeder’ services and smoothing traffic rights along the routes of the tit-for-tat global airline agreements mechanism. From the Caribbean to Africa and Asia, BOAC took shares in local regional airlines, some of which would make huge losses.
It was Sir Miles Thomas, DFC, who helmed BOAC from 1949 to 1956. He tried to clarify the working or operating behaviours and the accounting practices of this strange many-headed corporation. Tough new accountants were brought in under a lead figure, a ‘Comptroller’ – Basil Smallpiece (latterly to be knighted). Smallpiece would, in later years, actually run BOAC as managing director. Thomas was behind the idea of a re-engined BOAC Comet 5 specification – re-engined with Rolls-Royce Conways, but a new engine would not change Comet’s small cabin (Comet 5 did not appear). Despite this, Thomas, as with much of BOAC and much of the industry, still favoured the future as propeller based – with the Britannia proponent. The brilliant Sir Peter Masefield, being a mid-1950s figurehead of that large turbo-prop ‘club’, stated to the media: ‘We believe in turbo-props.’ Yet as the paint was still fresh on the Britannia 312, he would try to promote the A.E. Russell design team’s Bristol 200 short-medium-range tri-jet design against the de Havilland proposal which would become the Trident. Further comments in the debate suggested that airlines and airliner manufacturers were going with the jets as a result of necessity rather than desire.
Jet costs still frightened accountants.
In the summer of 1958, even the Americans were still debating the turboprop or jet conundrum and Lockheed’s newest iteration of the Electra line was poised. For the 1958 Albert Plesman lecture, the Douglas Company’s Engineering Vice-President, Arthur E. Raymond, categorically suggested that there was a future for a short-haul prop-liner and a future for the longer ranged jetliner.3 Each delivered its own benefits in kind in its own operating circumstances – so claimed Raymond.
Perhaps it was the combined failure of the Comet 1 and the brilliant success of the Viscount, which created the temporary in-passing fetish for the turboprop, notably the four-engined turboprop. The sliding graph of operating costs versus speed, and the economies of soon-to-arrive ‘high-bypass’ turbofans, would surely render all but the smaller, twin-turboprop feeder liner redundant. However, in 1958, it was Britannias, Vanguards and 400mph+ Electras one minute, and yet 707s, DC-8s and Tridents the next. The onward march of the urgent turbojet and then the turbofan would eclipse the millions of pounds and dollars sunk into turboprop sales pitches.
Had five years been wasted?
Then came the French and their jet Caravelle. The British, however, perhaps stung by the loss of the V1000, paused before taking up the VC10. Into the gap leapt the Americans. All this and more forced Douglas to create a Boeing 707 lookalike competitor and then forced the British and BOAC to demand a machine to perform firstly a different task, and then a similar transatlantic task. The VC10 and then the Super VC10 would have to answer both demands. No other airliner has ever had to bridge two operational arenas and be tasked with succeeding in both, yet criticised by the airline that demanded such abilities.
BOAC, from 1939 to 1958, expanded massively. In 1938 Imperial had carried 68,000 passengers, in 1958 its successor, BOAC, carried 480,000. Change was massive in its scale and soon, so was BOAC and the number of airliners it required.
BOAC Buys British
Would BOAC support British industry and its workers by ordering British airliners? It might, but political requirements and marginal seats in key constituencies were hardly the stuff of an airline – unless that airline was taxpayer-funded and ordered about by a political animal of ministerial rank. Such considerations would affect the fate of the Vickers VC7 airliner variant. And what if a new British Government decided to stop funding the development of the RAF’s new jet transport future – the V1000 itself? Where would that leave parallel BOAC interest in the VC7 derivative? This was the political and corporate mix post-1951, just as George Edwards (not then a ‘Sir’) and the team at Vickers were designing the V1000 and VC7 future far beyond the Comet 4’s capabilities and far beyond any, as yet unseen rival.
There remained the fact that the big problem for the British aircraft manufacturing companies was the very small home market for their aircraft designs. Any British machine had to have overseas customer appeal, yet within the BOAC and BEA State-sponsored design dictates that focused on British needs, an inherent self-limiting factor was obvious for the British family of airframe makers. Greater numbers than the home airline market could support were required to ensure a profitable production run. The Vickers Viscount leapfrogged the problem and achieved global success, the V1000 and VC7 could have done the same thing.
The structural policy problems were not solely BOAC’s fault – the airline was a British Government and Civil Service edict; yet BOAC had in part, had a hand in creating that very landscape and then went on to criticise the airframe it had not only requested, but dictated operating performance requirements for – the VC10 itself.
Meetings between Vickers, BOAC and the British Government took place at this time. Messrs Thomas, Straight and Smallpiece appeared for BOAC; Vickers ‘porkpie’ hatted Edwards made his mark. Promises of increased thrust and payload range from the developed Rolls-Royce Conways, as improvements to the VC7 variant of the V1000, were all very well, but BOAC’s Smallpiece dealt in the now, and the now was that the VC7 was not what BOAC wanted on transatlantic routes, and only existed on paper. But surely that did not mean that BOAC would put up with new, but small capacity Comet 4s with their range issues, or face the 1960s armed with the Bristol Britannia and its straight, unswept-wings and whirling props, however quiet it was? And were not Boeing promising to enter the jet age with a new large airliner? But, that airliner would be unable to service BOAC’s vital cash flow earning African and Asian routes due to its runway performance issues.
Confusion and contradiction reigned – again. The deployment of strategic irrationality seemed too obvious for words.
Then came yet another British general election and with it came a new wave of non-aviation-minded government men and another new minister. The Comet disasters at BOAC, the delays in securing the Comet 4 and the Britannia’s engine problems, all piled up alongside the Suez crisis, European uncertainties, and the looming end-of-Empire in Africa and the British dominions. Quietly, the commercial relevance of the aerial links between London, New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and the US West Coast, were also lining up as soon to be vital operational and financial issues for BOAC. Competition on long-haul routes from Pan American, KLM, Air France, and the new Lufthansa, was also building.
Sir Miles Thomas resigned from the heavy burden of running BOAC in 1956 – perhaps worn down by the political chicanery required in running a nationalised industry as an airline and being regularly upset from strategic policy decisions and their execution by a revolving door of ministers. There had been five Ministers of Civil Aviation, all of them in the House of Lords from 1945 to 1948 and there were four new Ministers of Transport, all of them in the House of Commons, in six years up to 1958. BOAC itself – up to 1958 – had seven chairmen from its on-paper inception in 1940. Harold Hartley had experience of ‘air’ via his time at the emerging startup BEA, d’Erlanger had ‘air’ experience too, and soon Air Commodore Whitney Straight, MC, would bring military and civilian expertise to the arena as BOAC Managing Director in 1947–1949 and subsequently as chairman in 1949–1951 and executive vice-chairman to 1957. Intriguingly, Straight, an ex-RAF pilot and assistant to the Duke of Kent, was not as ‘British’ as he appeared – being Americanborn of ‘society’ parentage but becoming a naturalised Briton. He was, however, a cousin of C.V. Whitney – a former chairman of Pan American Airways! Was this where BOAC’s ‘preference’ for American airframes stemmed from? Over the next few years, Labour and Conservative Governments would come and go; so too would BOAC leaders and Ministers of Aviation and Ministers of Supply.
In the days of the Imperial to BOAC construction – circa 1938 – Lord Reith had advised freedom from national duties for the new airline – if better aircraft were available from foreign manufacturers, BOAC should be allowed to purchase them. This attitude, of course, conflicted with government decreed edicts about Imperial/ BOAC as a national ‘instrument’. But British leadership in the ‘air’ arena should not, said Reith, be solely tied to commercial operations that were self-supporting.4
In April 1956, Basil Smallpiece found himself working for a new BOAC Chairman – Gerard d’Erlanger, a man with vital wartime operational aviation experience running the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) – yet he would be a parttime chieftain. The board would appear together for just one or two days per month. The board was responsible to the minister and the minister responsible to Parliament. It was not a forensic strategic plan. We can see that structurally BOAC was just like Imperial and like the colonial mindset, British leaders may well have been slow moving and, we have to suggest, slow to adapt and slow to seize opportunity. As such it was little different from many inward-looking management and corporate mechanisms and structures once they have grown large and of superior, self-entitled self-view. The privately funded Vickers of course, under Sir George Edwards, suffered from no such provincial thinking – Viscount, Valiant, and V1000/VC7 proved that.
As BOAC persevered with the Comet 4 on transatlantic routes it was never designed for (a fact so often either hidden or obscured in the narrative then and now), Boeing were rushing into a wider future. British national pride was, however, understandable as BOAC’s Captain M. Majendie launched the airline’s first scheduled Comet 1 service into the air from London Heathrow in 1952, and the same pride would pertain when the Comet 4 beat the 707 across the Atlantic over five long and difficult years later, but pride had gone before a fall once before and might do so again. The Comet versus 707 transatlantic air race was more about PR puff than actual operating performance and costs. BOAC was ‘flying the flag’ and inconvenient truths could be veiled by pomp and circumstance.
For the 1950s, BOAC was structured into several internal, route operations divisions as:
(a) Western routes: USA, Canada, Caribbean, South American
(b) Eastern routes: Australia, India/Asia, Far East
(c) Southern routes: West, East, South Africa
The MRE, or ‘Medium-range Empire’, routes defined the structure and the Far East routings were ‘Dragon Routes’.
Until the advent of a cheaper second cabin concept that came into international airline agreement in late 1952, airline cabins were mainly configured to a luxury standard with a 60 inch seat pitch, and for BOAC, specially designed sleeper seats pivoted down into an almost flat recliner. In fact it was American domestic developments that led to the new, no-frills, cheaper ‘Coach’ standard brand of airline travel. These new cheaper tickets opened up the floodgates to mass US domestic air travel and transatlantic airlines soon realised that they could make more money by putting more seats into their aircraft, and by cutting out the lavish cabin service standards of food and amenities. However, even in the new ‘Tourist Class’, seat pitch was 36–40 inches – down from 60 inches, yet with plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. It looked a good deal for the new customer base and allowed many more people the opportunity to travel, but in reality it was a closed shop rigged marketing ploy created and agreed by the members of the international airline community via their airline ‘club’.
BOAC converted several of its Lockheed Constellations to carry sixty-eight passengers on Tourist Class oceanic runs and the ticket cost of a return flight from London to New York in the new cabin was ‘just’ £173, which was a massive reduction on the previous cost of £254. Meal services remained of quality and toilets spacious. BOAC even provided complimentary perfume and eau de toilet on board. In hot tropical zones, the smell in the cabin was now more eau de Elizabeth Arden, rather than the eau de armpit of Imperial’s sweltering days.
BOAC’s revenue shot up once it was able to fit more seats into existing cabins and the seat per mile cost improved. With some ticket prices halving, this – in 1952 – was the gateway to the age of mass travel, however, this was more Second Class, and not yet the true ‘Economy Class’ that was agreed by the international airlines in 1958 with even cheaper fares and its close-coupled seats of 33–34 inches pitch – which would soon become the industry standard beyond the curtains of the deluxe environment of First Class. Business Class (today’s Second Class) had not yet been thought of and would not manifest for decades. But even by the 1960s, the cost of an Economy Class ticket on a BOAC VC10 or 707 service was often more than the annual wage of a working man. It would not be until the 1970s that true mass transit travel, available to all, would become a wide-bodied airliner reality.
At many BOAC stops an ex-Imperial Airways station existed, and when BOAC was born, the only thing that changed was the name on the signage. By 1947–1948, BOAC had a fiscal deficit of a staggering £8million. BOAC, mired in the processes of government, Civil Service and board, lacked KLM-like dynamism, only slowly moving towards rationalisation of its fleet mix and operating practices.
Fast forward to the late-1950s and chaos still seemed to rule in terms of aircraft types and aircraft requirements. In 1953, the true Tourist Class had been agreed as a new revenue earning concept by the international airlines and the services came into being in the summer of that year. BOAC were seating up to seventy passengers in Tourist Class cabins in 749 Constellations and soon its stop-gap fleet of tired DC-7Cs. A new era of travel for the people, not the elite, opened up.
At BOAC the Comet 1s had come and then gone – grounded upon the wings of disaster – the sleek and sound Bristol Britannia had been ordered, but was greatly delayed in its long-haul variant by engine icing issues; second-hand giant Douglas DC-7Cs were quickly procured. BOAC had previously found the US dollars to purchase its own fleet of Boeing Stratocruisers (for which some US airlines received subsidy for operating, due its ‘issues’), so furthering the BOAC-Boeing relationship that had started with the BOAC Clipper flying boats at Baltimore.
Boeing 377 Stratocruisers soon plied BOAC Atlantic Blue-Riband routes (yet latterly to be so unwisely sent to work on BOAC African services). Some BOAC Stratocruisers were all First Class ‘Monarch’ seating only (often all-male), and carried less than forty passengers, other BOAC Stratocruisers launched the new ‘Coronet’ Tourist Class services to America and had a higher seat-count of up to sixty. Yet the Stratocruisers were afflicted with engine, airframe and aerodynamic issues and became a bit of a blot on Boeing’s high-quality reputation; Pan Am suffered four Stratocruiser losses and other operators had incidents.
Across the BOAC global network, huge numbers of spare engines had to be placed to serve the intensive (and expensive) maintenance needs of such large, piston-powered fleets as led by the temperamental Stratocruiser and pistonhungry ‘Connies’.
There were also the military-derived airframes that were the Handley Page Hermes and Canadair Argonauts, in fact, a plethora of types in the BOAC stable. The 1950s fleet mix was almost as confusing and expensive as Imperial’s had been in 1938. Where was the consistency of strategy, vision, policy and execution for the airline, or those that managed it? In the structure of the corporation’s dictated existence from varying and opposing political parties and policies, we might see the root of some of its problems.
British Government Ministers of Transport/Air 1940–1964
| 1945: | Lord Swinton |
| 1946–1949: | Lord Winster |
| 1949–1951: | Rees-Williams |
| 1951–1953: | Maclay |
| 1953–1954: | Lennox Boyd |
| 1954–1956: | Boyd-Carpenter |
| 1956–1959: | Watkinson |
| 1959–1960: | Sandys |
| 1960–1963: | Thorneycroft |
| 1963–1964: | Amery |
| 1964: | Jenkins |
BOAC’s management leadership was appointed by the State:
BOAC Chairmen/CEO/Managing Directors 1940–1964
| 1941–1943: | Clive Pearson |
| 1943: | Sir Harold Howitt |
| 1944–1945 | Lord Knollys |
| 1946: | Sir Harold Hartley |
| 1947–1949: | Whitney Straight |
| 1949–1956: | Sir Miles Thomas |
| 1956–1961: | Sir Gerard d’Erlanger |
| 1961–1964: | Sir Matthew Slattery |
| 1964: | Sir Giles Guthrie |
Note:
| 1943: | Walter Runciman, as Imperial/BOAC Chairman and Director General Civil Aviation BOAC |
| 1946: | Air Commodore A. Critchley, Director General BOAC |
| 1951–1956: | Sir Basil Smallpiece, Financial Comptroller/Deputy CEO Whitney Straight, Executive Vice Chairman to 1957 |
| 1956–1964: | Sir Basil Smallpiece, Managing Director BOAC |
| 1964: | sees Sir Giles Guthrie, appointed to run BOAC |
BOAC-BEA Merger in 1954?
In 1974, BOAC merged with BEA to form the ‘new’ British Airways. Yet the first suggestion of a BOAC-BEA merger had been made as early as 1954 by Sir Miles Thomas. This idea would have solved the problem of BOAC’s long-haul routes not being integrated into a British domestic and European network. Surely BOAC and BEA could feed each other with passenger traffic. An agreement – not one for merger, but for connecting services – was reached, and BOAC moved its Zurich base to Rome in exchange for ceding rights to BEA in other locations.
When BOAC Chairman Sir Miles Thomas resigned in March 1956, the airline was making a profit, yet still framed by annual tax-payer funded State grants. BOAC was no longer costing the tax payer £8,000,000 a year, but it remained far from cost-effective. The problems with the delays to the consequent BOAC fleet and crew costs created a deficit of £2,700,000 in 1957.5 Wisely, Thomas had got out before trouble set back in. Yet BOAC was only narrowly failing to reach its sixty-five per cent profitable load factor requirements, but its fleet and operating costs were abnormally diverse and high by any standards and a huge contrast to KLM’s lower cost-base. Then came the costs of restarting Comet operations with the revised Comet 4.
Comet 4 Contradiction
History, as it is written, records that the de Havilland Comet design was beyond compare as a world beating revolution as the world’s first jet airliner, one that was stymied, not by design problems, but by unexpected structural issues that manifested as the Comet 1 disasters. History also records that after the investigations, Comet 4 entered service with BOAC, beat the Boeing 707 across the Atlantic into commercial service (surely a hollow victory) and went on to an illustrious career as the shining light of British airliner brilliance.
Underneath the nationalistic pride of the Comet 4 there were, however, often conveniently unmentioned issues with the design and operation of it. We should not forget that BOAC divested itself of its entire Comet 4 fleet very quickly indeed – when the airframes were still young. The question was why? The answer was, things had moved quickly on.
Over at KLM, the dynamic Albert Plesman was not so sure that the Comet was so vital to survival, and on this occasion, held back from fleet procurement. Plesman thought the Comet 1’s max-range payload and small cabin was of a serious economic and operational issue, and he noted the untested nature of the Comet technology. Fate would provide clarity, and KLM quite happily waited to enter the jet age with the DC-8 nearly a decade later.
In an interview with the author, Group Captain J.C. Cunningham, DSO and two Bars, DFC and Bar, CBE, the great wartime night-fighter and de Havilland test pilot, discussed such issues that he felt, ‘the luxury of hindsight’ could latterly be used to illustrate.6 Cunningham would never have criticised de Havilland’s or the Comet in public, nor ‘reacted’ to questioning of the legend, but as a pilot and man of intellect, he knew full well that Comet was flawed, and the issue of its wing slats being removed at prototype stage and the later issues and accidents with the Comet’s take-off technique, obscured an aerodynamic truth. Comet’s narrow cabin and limited capacity also proved that it was an insular and perhaps incomplete design.
To Cunningham’s defence of Comet, Albert Plesman, KLM Royal Dutch Airline’s founder and leader, might have argued that the Comet’s capacity issues were obvious early on, even in 1957, and were the very reasons why KLM – as one of the world’s leading airlines at that time, was prepared to let its competitors rush into Comet orders – had not ordered the Comet, thus leaving the propdriven KLM fleet behind its jet-powered competitors for years, yet with minimal apparent detriment to its popularity or resulting finances.
The brilliant John Cunningham knew what he was about and was correct that the Comet 4 was a fine machine, but even he had difficulty side-stepping the issues and specifically the BOAC- related issues; despite the fact that the Comet had nearly double the thrust-to-weight ratio of an early 707, this was achieved by the Comet being smaller and lighter and thus constrained in its size and range. The Comet 1 disasters and ensuing delays pitched the Comet 4, notably in BOAC guise, into the new 1960s battle of the bigger transatlantic jets. Yet there remained the original early 1950s issues of the Comet’s very small, narrow cabin and resultant limited passenger and mail/cargo carrying abilities. Comet 4 still had, despite fuselage extension, limited two-class passenger accommodation. BOAC Comet 4s were rarely configured for the maximum eighty passengers possible and early machines were configured for just fifty-two passengers. Latterly, other major airliner operators struggled to get ninety seats crammed into the longer-bodied 4C variant. In BOAC Comet 4 operations, notably on African and Asian routes, these factors would manifest on a regular basis via overbooking, off-loading, lack of availability, and reduced income due to an inability to carry people and freight. BOAC said it made a profit on the Comet 4’s seat per mile and revenue-per-tonne costs, but many observers were sceptical.
On Empire route services, notably the prestige run to Johannesburg, via Nairobi, BOAC Comet 4s were configured to have an over-wing cabin zone curtained off, behind which, large mail and freight cages resided. It is anecdotally recorded that on occasion, faced with stranded passengers unable to get a seat on a fully booked Comet 4 service out of Nairobi, BOAC staff removed such freight holds, borrowed three rows of seats from the East African Airways Comet 4 hangar, and bolted them in on a temporary basis! More commonly, Comet 4 could not offer freight consigners the capacity they required for ever-increasing traffic.7
John Cunningham correctly noted that the Comet had been given the runway performance to, ‘get up and off ’, as he stated it, from tropical airports. Cunningham had been to Seattle and flown the 707 prototype 367-80, and praised its general flying characteristics, but correctly identified the issues of lack of power and such effect on likely tropical runway performance, and the concerns over asymmetric handling with the wing-pylon mounted engines. But the Boeing was bigger, stronger, and crucially, the cabin was wider and longer than the Comet 4’s, and more able to be developed to add passenger and cargo capacity: a 707 could earn more money with four engines than a Comet 4 ever could.
After Comet 1 and its losses, the revised long-range Comet 3 was viable, but BOAC wanted more, so begat the even more delayed Comet 4, which provided service not just for BOAC, but, via the BEA 4B and the 4C variants, several other overseas airlines.
It is said by many, even aviation experts, that in their Caravelle, it was the French who pioneered the idea of mounting a jet engine on a stub or pylon off the back of fuselage, but that is in error – because it was the Germans in 1944, with the FW 283 athodyd research airframe, who first designed such a jet engine layout and mounting configuration.
Whatever the provenance, perhaps BEA really ought to have purchased early Caravelles, or got de Havilland to licence build them (de Havilland’s were already supplying the Caravelle’s nose section under contract, and Rolls-Royce supplied the engines) and many airline accountants and engineers said so, but the thought of BEA buying an exotic foreign machine was simply too much for the British management minds on BEA’s board and within government. Or what about saving five years (on the Trident gestation) and creating a British licence built Caravelle, or even a threeengined Caravelle variant? Would this not have solved many problems very quickly and above all very cheaply? All that de Havilland’s would have to have done is brace a central engine into the rear air stairs void, plug in an S-duct fin-based orifice and an exhaust, and the competition (notably the Vickers Vanjet) would have been beaten overnight by an already flying proven airframe tweaked for the 1960s.
The idea had legs and was indeed suggested in 1958 by famed aviation commentator Stanley H. Evans, but it was all far beyond BOAC, BEA, and British minds. Meanwhile, the low-wing loading slippery Caravelle even sold to United Airlines in America and became the defining short-medium-haul tool for many airlines. Latterly, the Caravelle morphed into a JT8D-9 fan jet powered final iteration of Europe’s best selling 1960s twin-jet, in total selling 282 airframes.
If the latter, aft-fan engined TWA Caravelle order had progressed, the superb French airliner’s undoubted place in history might have been even more significant.
Caravelle could not be procured for BOAC. British airliners were preferred – until it came to ordering the Boeing 707 fleet, but at least that was not French! Such were the attitudes displayed. A little known fact is that the Australians at Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) got very close to ordering Caravelles for domestic and regional services and it is reputed that only political pressure stopped them doing it – and rival Qantas had decided on prop-driven American Lockheed Electra’s for regional use.
But, in 1955, on its first-flight, had the rear-engined, low-sweep angle (20º) winged Caravelle set certain British minds thinking? Could the Caravelle concept be rethought? Time would tell. Vickers of course, had, prior to the Caravelle, previously been researching a rear-engined, twin-engined, jet airliner since 1951 and had mounted a small jet engine off the back of Wellington in 1947.
Meanwhile, even the Russians were announcing twin-jet and tri-jet short to medium-range airliners in the forms of the Tu-134 and Tu-154 series respectively. Both were T-tailed (with tall empennages and large horizontal/elevator surfaces to try and reduce the deep stall risks), they were swept-winged and had good payloadto-range figures, only in wing aerodynamics (with a distinct lack of leading edge devices being apparent) and of poor engine economy, did they lag behind. Such machines provided years of excellent service to the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Some commentators insisted that the Comet 4B/C could, and should, have sold by the ‘hundreds’, but such a view ignores the constraints of the Comet’s cabin economics. By the time the Comet 4C was in full production for other airlines, BOAC had, having insisted that it could rely on Comet 4 to fend off rival airlines and their 707s and DC-8s, suddenly moved on to 707s and then VC10s and sidestepped becoming a major Comet 4C operator. Time and tide had waited for no man, not even de Havilland’s oh-so-elegant Comet 4.
BEA had also used a high-density five-across Tourist Class layout in the their Comets – seating ninety-nine passengers and really excelling on routes to Cyprus, Rome and Madrid, despite the fuel-thirsty four-engined Rolls-Royce Avon configuration – even if a Caravelle could have done the same thing on two Avon engines! But that was French and it seems, beyond consideration. If only the Vickers Vanjet two, or three-engined airframe had existed.
Runway Power
Of significance to later events, even at this stage of 1950s design, a pattern was evident: British jet airliners had more power and better runway performance than their American counterparts, and less payload capacity. BOAC’s decision to try and use their Comet 4s on the North Atlantic run smacked of confusion – the Comet 4 was not designed for such a route, despite subsequent impressions created by the modified historical narrative. The Comet 4 long-haul runs to Hong Kong or Johannesburg made much more sense, except that the loads accommodated were so small. And did not BOAC now prefer propeller-driven machines like the Britannia anyway?
The dear old Comet, Britain’s bright, shiny hope had little hope of competing against Boeing’s specifically designed intercontinental machine. It was into this overall toxic fiscal mix that the procurement of the VC10 was about to become another BOAC issue.
The 1950s British Government, via Transport Minister Watkinson, had tried to impose a civil servant upon BOAC’s daily management, a Sir George Cribbet, as chief executive. Basil Smallpiece refused to accept such a move and heated debate ensued across the BOAC board. A compromise power structure was devised, yet it was a one that left the civil servant with a great deal of power and the ability to act as d’ Erlanger’s deputy.
Basil Smallpiece found himself elevated into a new role as BOAC managing director.
Flight magazine’s opinion on 27 April 1956, was that the new BOAC management structure now had aviation experience and could work well. But then came the thorny question of BOACs new fleet for the 1960s – be it American or British built? Or American-built with British engines? And what of the now mooted British supersonic project that over-enthusiastic airline people inside and outside the factories and boardrooms said would be in service by 1965? Some sages of the airline business knew better and said so. None other than BEA’s Chief Engineer and board member Beverley Shenstone – soon to be a President of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) stated (to much criticism) that the British supersonic project would take ten, not five years, to materialise and would not enter service until 1975 – and he was proven to be correct. Shenstone (creator of the Spitfire’s unique forward-swept twin-axis elliptical wing shape) would latterly be appointed a board director of BOAC and was not alone in his late 1950s argument that the national carrier needed to decide quickly and clearly just which aircraft it was going to support. The whole prop-versus-jet-supersonic argument was a mess, and a point of vacillation. Decisions, far reaching decisions, were needed. Shenstone, a ‘foreigner’ remember (he was Canadian), yet a friend of Edwards, said so in Flight and the national newspapers, to much criticism from ‘the establishment’. As so often, he was correct of course, which really got up other peoples’ noses.
The corporate water was as clear as mud.
And what about building Boeing 707s in Britain under licence with Rolls-Royce engines? Would that be a good political idea that might override engineering or operational requirements? It was actually mooted, but sidestepped.
A Created Confusion?
Comets, Britannias, and confusion reigned. But hang on, said BOAC as a Statesponsored government-influenced, nationalised mechanism; we better have a big four-engined jet! There then came a moment of decidedly poignant irony when, faced with a reality that it would be five years before BOAC could procure a suitable long-range British-designed jet airliner, the government asked Vickers if it could resurrect the V1000/VC7 project! Transport Minister Harold Watkinson had no political choice but to ask Vickers about the chances for a reborn V1000 as a VC7.
Edwards told Watkinson that the V1000 jigs had been destroyed and that the whole thing was finished and done with.
For its 707 order (an on-paper aeroplane), BOAC had spent millions in dollars as a net outflow from the UK Exchequer at a time of vital UK foreign currency and export sales demand. BOAC had fifteen 707s on order by early 1957 – at nearly £50 million. No more foreign currency spending was to be allowed. BOAC’s next procurement would have to be British. A new airline transport world was being born. Unlike Imperial, BOAC would now have to act with haste, if such a thing was conceivable. The options were the proposed Handley Page HP 97, as a direct derivative of the Handley Page Victor bomber, over which there were design concerns about its T-tail; and the de Havilland development of the Comet 4 with larger wing, and possibly, Conway engines, as a DH118, or a de Havilland DH121 as a civil airframe; or the Vickers Vanjet – as part of the two, three and four-engined jet airframe development family from which a suitable machine could be selected. It was from the Vanjet studies that the VC10 eventually arrived as a design.
Government gave the nod to develop the new BOAC-operated and defined, British designed and built, four-engined jet airliner – a machine for Southern hemisphere routes, not, we should note, principally as a lean, transatlantic cruiser for the New York or Los Angeles express runs. Basil Smallpiece was of an opposing mindset and thought that the creation of a British iteration of a 707-type idea was preferable, but he was involuntarily removed from the process due to ill health. Go-ahead was given from the government to Vickers to proceed – not with an immediate firm order, but with a commitment to the machine, and there was also the likely RAF Transport Command order to help. Intriguingly, the Vickers factory lay in Minister Watkinson’s constituency of Woking, Surrey, which may or may not have been of advantage.
BOAC looked at Vickers’ ideas for the Vanjet and told the government that one of the proposed Vanjet-derived designs would be ‘economically appropriate’ for the routes they required it for. This was a phrase well worth remembering, as it proves that BOAC knew full well where Vickers were going in design terms, and thus that the subsequent VC10 design concept and highly engineered build quality should not have been a surprise to BOAC in design and operating costs terms.
Numbers Games
Thus, with firm orders from BOAC, the VC10 story was about to begin, but even the act of ordering was beset by BOAC confusion. Were, as BOAC claimed, thirty-five VC10s ‘ordered’ in January 1958 (with an option for twenty more), with Vickers apparently insisting on such numbers? It seems not.
We rely on Vickers own records, and the report by Vickers’ Dr Norman Barfield8 into the affair, to disprove such erroneous myth. Barfield was clear that Vickers man Edwards had stated that there was ‘not’ a positive stand to demand an order for thirty-five VC10s, and that this was a discussion number that reflected (and indeed was indicative of) BOAC’s own claims that even with its 707 and VC10s as ordered, BOAC had stated that it would not have enough aircraft! So how could ‘thirty-five’ be a Vickers ploy, as opposed to a defining and to be argued-over number by BOAC. If it said it needed many more airliners, how could BOAC then prevaricate over pre-existing VC10 orders as it did? Vickers contends that there was no ‘ultimatum’ to BOAC and that increases in 1960s passenger and freight numbers, as predicted in BOAC’s own official traffic analysis plan (after a dip in 1959 across BOAC and BEA), led to BOAC’s suggestion not just of needing twenty-seven more airframes, but also of finding a way of meeting increasing freight demands – hence the nonpassenger VC10 pure-freighter variant that Vickers designed, and the cargo-door equipped VC10 passenger/freight ‘combi’ – as latterly delivered to EAA and BUA. By 1961, having claimed it had been forced into ordering the VC10; BOAC suddenly upped its VC10 order book and hinted at a larger version!
The paradoxes and internal inconsistencies in BOAC’s claims and positions can only provide the observer with evidence of BOAC’s allegedly confused and dysfunctional mindset at the time. Internal inconsistencies presented by a party always reveal truths, or otherwise, as found within its behavioural action and subsequent analysis thereof. True, BOAC had the impossible job of balancing the issues of what government had decreed to it, and of rationalising and executing those demands, but BOAC was part of that process and had its own internal strategic contradictions within a mechanism that seemed to come straight out of a management book on how not to do it. It seems that strategic irrationality was deliberately created across the set. Looked at from today, it all seems incredible.
For external opinion on the machinations of BOAC, we can refer to the observations of former aircraft designer and 1950s aviation writer Stanley H. Evans, whose public and private views about BOAC’s strategy were scathing. Evans stated: ‘I have nothing but abysmal contempt for the technical ignorance of the cohorts who have brought BOAC to such a sorry pass with its deplorable melange of aircraft types. I firmly believe the whole managerial structure of BOAC is archaic in this technological age.’9
Derek Wood, the well-known aviation writer, who would go on to write the brilliant, Project Cancelled, also stated that the cancellation of the V1000 represented the main cause to result in the effect of the death of the prospects for British airliner manufacturing and sales in the 1960s.10
Such BOAC machinations would come back to haunt the VC10 in the mid-1960s. But back at the turn of the decade that such a wonderful piece of industrial design as the VC10 should emanate from so much trouble was a rare highlight. A true ‘Speedbird’ would soon grace the skies. It would come from England’s leafy county of Surrey, yet be born of the true grit of a Tyneside engineering ethos going back decades into the industrial revolution.
Prior to the Second World War, a young engineer named Rex Pierson had joined Vickers – long before his rise to rank as chief designer; post-1945, there would come the genius of George Edwards and his talented team, who would, in less than two decades, produce a broad range of the finest civil and military airframes ever to stem from one manufacturer. Pierson kept Vickers close to the RAF and it paid dividends. Edwards would do likewise. Barnes Wallis was part of Vickers, so too was Supermarine and its Spitfire and post-war jet fighters. From Viscount to Valiant, from the V1000 to the VC10 and to Concorde, Vickers had the glittering future of British aviation in its hands. Yet others – men of less vision – would destroy that golden opportunity as they clung to the U-bend of political and corporate existence beyond the gates of Weybridge. Somehow, the VC10, and then Concorde, would transcend such games of smoke and mirrors. Vickers would ascend.