Vintage Blackbushe thread

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Eric Mc said:

Chilli said:

Also, re the Comet (I'm no expert so bear with) I thought that the plane was doomed when they realised the design fault with the square windows, and that they were pulled from production. However that one has round windows. I guess they carried on then?

The original Comet 1 was grounded permanently after the tragedies of the early 1950s. It is true that the Comet 1s had rectangular shaped windows. However, of the two Comet 1s which crashed due to explosive decompression, only one had sufficient wreckage recovered to enable the investigators to work out where the fatigue crack which started the fuselage failure began - and it wasn't at a cabin window. In fact, it was in a roof aperture which contained a fibreglass cover for an RDF (Radio Direction Finding) aerial.

However, another Comet 1 was tested to destruction in a water tank at Farnborough and on this example, the failure DID occur with one of the cabin windows.

It was obvious that the square corners of the apertures in the Comet 1 were suspect so the Comet 1 was redesigned with oval shaped windows. The new version, which also replaced the De Havilland Ghost engines with Rolls Royce Avons, was branded the Comet 2. No Comet 2s entered airline service but a small number served with the RAF and the Royal Canadian Air Force up until the late 1960s without incident.

A stretched development of the Comet, called the Comet 4, re-entered airline service with BOAC in 1958 and the last were withdrawn from use in the early 1980s. The last operator was Dan Air, which explains the Dan AIr example being at Blackbushe in the mid 1970s.

Only one example of the stretched Comet 3 was ever built and it was used as a test aircraft.

Edited by Eric Mc on Monday 14th February 10:37

the Comet was taken into use, by the RAF, as the Nimrod. now sadly gone due to our genius government