The Shape of Things to Come Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies

In the two decades following the Second World War,

the British aircraft industry flourished

in a pageant of ingenuity and innovation.

REPORTER: A brilliant new all-British achievement made headline news throughout the world.

Aviation was Britain's largest industry and for a few golden years,

it led the world.

REPORTER: Britain's Comet jet airliner

has again been breaking records.

Whichever way you looked at it, there was no plane like it in the world.

Britain had invented the jet engine and proven it in warplanes

but the new jet age was set to change passenger transport, too.

People couldn't understand how a jet aircraft actually worked.

It was a sort of magic, in a way.

Things could happen. Britain could make it.

We were giving to reach for the sky.

Tails up for Britain.

Aircraft and the men who flew them were the stars of the age.

Thousands flocked to witness the daring feats of pilots

like "Cat's Eyes" Cunningham, wartime night fighter ace.

We needed our heroes. God knows we needed our heroes.

Sometimes, the confidence was shaken by tragedy.

But this was the age of the jet, when Britain ruled the skies.

It was going to be the aeroplane that showed

that we were still world players.

When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne,

a lot was happening for Britain.

We were coming out of austerity, ration books were soon to end,

Hillary and Tenzing climbed to the top of Mount Everest,

Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes.

REPORTER: The tape has broken, and so is the record athletes have long been dreaming about.

Look at that excitement. Look at those achievements.

There was a kind of feeling,

that was being quite shamelessly promoted on all sides,

of the new Elizabethan era,

leading to a kind of Renaissance, a rebirth of British enterprise.

Thank God we could now put the War behind us,

but use a lot of the technology we developed in the War

for peaceful purposes.

Foremost among those technologies was a new generation of jets,

powerful enough to turn these new Elizabethans

into world leaders in civil aviation.

REPORTER: Here it is.

In the precise language of the engineer,

it's called a jet propulsion gas turbine.

To you and me, it's the jet engine,

one of the marvels of this century of marvels.

The jet engine was world beating technology and it was British.

REPORTER: To Farnborough for the world's greatest airshow.

Britain's faith in jets justified

and prominent among them, the Avro Ashton.

This is a development of the Tudor

with four jet engines installed in pairs.

It will be used for experimental work on high-altitude jet flights.

Altogether, of the 60 planes on show, nearly half were jets.

The Farnborough airshow was the showcase for the best of British.

Every September, crowds would flock to Hampshire

to see the most amazing aircraft the country could produce.

They were family days of picnics, charabancs and stiff necks.

Going to the Farnborough airshow as a child was a magical experience.

You saw wonderful, modern aircraft

that felt so close you could reach out and touch them.

They were doing aerobatics,

they were nearly all demonstrated by test pilots

who could make them do wonderful things

and to see this was so inspiring.

I never, ever grew out of wanting to be a pilot.

Gosh! She's wizard.

It was the best of British technology

and you had this wonderful meeting of all sections of British society.

You saw the latest civil planes,

soaring round, performing near aerobatics right over your head.

As a child, that was just glorious stuff.

The aircraft names seemed magical.

Fairey and English Electric, Sopwith and Supermarine,

Vickers-Armstrong, Handley Page, Hunting, Saunders-Roe and Short,

Gloucester and de Havilland, Bristol and Blackburn.

It seemed incredible that in peace time,

one small country could still sustain so many manufacturers,

turning out so many promising aircraft.

REPORTER: Final verdict on Farnborough,

Britain's aircraft industry consolidates its supremacy.

But these bright new aircraft were the results of secret plans

laid in the darkest days of war.

ALARM BELL RINGS

With the outbreak of World War II,

all production of civil aircraft had halted

to concentrate on the fighters and bombers that would protect our shores.

As early as 1942, however, a committee was set up

to plan the peace time future of British civil aviation.

The Brabazon Committee was set up, really, in the depths of the War

but at least we had El Alamein and Stalingrad,

so it looked like we were going to win.

So the problem was then,

how was Britain going to use its big aircraft industry

to try and compete with the Americans

when the Americans have got all the transport aircraft

while we've been building fighters and bombers?

And led by Lord Brabazon,

the man who had the first pilot's licence in Britain,

and the famous numberplate, FLY1, to prove it,

he and the team came up with a set of aircraft

that they believed, in the long-term,

would allow Britain to prove its worth

and compete on world air routes.

The Brabazon Committee decided that Britain needed

a family of planes to serve short and medium haul,

domestic and European destinations

and the long haul flights of the north Atlantic

and the routes of Empire.

With this masterplan in place, tenders went out to leading manufacturers.

The result was extraordinary.

An astonishing outpouring

of wildly different passenger aircraft designs,

all been produced simultaneously.

At the time, jet propulsion was fast

but much too thirsty for long haul flights.

Watch that gallon go!

So Type I on the Brabazon Committee's list

was a massive petrol-driven, piston-engined aircraft.

Unveiled in 1949, this leviathan promised splendid,

luxurious travel for the rich and privileged.

Awe-inspiring, jaw-droppingly huge.

REPORTER: Here she comes.

130 tonnes of superlative engineering.

Six years of research, ingenuity, invention.

Sycophantically, Bristol named this aircraft

after the great Lord himself.

It was henceforth the Bristol Brabazon.

Creating a liner of the air, passengers would travel in style.

They would have their own bunks in private cabins, powder rooms,

a cocktail bar and even a separate cinema.

Chief test pilot on the Brabazon and was Bill Pegg.

He had worked stolidly for Bristol since the mid '30s.

Crowds would gather wherever it flew.

Faster, faster! The nose wheel is off! The nose wheel is off!

I'm looking to see the main wheel. The main wheel's come off.

She's off!

She's off!

She's hopped along the grass! The Brabazon is in the air!

The Brabazon was designed to cruise at 250 mph,

carrying 100 passengers, and take 17 hours to fly the Atlantic.

The Brabazon was a good idea at the time.

They assumed that with a new generation of piston engines,

it would become very much more efficient.

It was built for the transatlantic route.

The wingspan of the Brabazon was 11 metres greater

than that of a jumbo jet.

It was stupendously huge.

It was an aircraft that really harked back

to the pre-war concept of flying,

that it would be only for the very wealthy.

They were after the first-class passengers from the Queen Mary

and if you were going to cram them for 17 hours crossing the Atlantic,

they needed space, they needed stewards, they needed a dining room.

The Brabazon pioneered high-pressure hydraulics

and electric engine controls.

But the aircraft was unmistakably old, piston-driven technology,

out of time and out of place in the new Elizabethan age.

By 1953, no airline had ordered her.

Impressive as she was, her future was the scrapheap,

without ever taking a fare-paying customer.

A contemporary of the Brabazon,

the Vickers Viscount may have had propellers

but it was what lay behind them that made the difference,

and that was the jet turbine.

The aircraft was revolutionary

because it introduced a new kind of engine, the turboprop engine,

which is basically a jet engine with a propeller on the front.

The major advantage with the turboprop engine, of course, is fuel economy.

It was so much cheaper to run than a piston engine aircraft.

REPORTER: The propeller turbine is not a stand-in for the pure jet.

The air screw is still considered the most efficient

medium for transforming power into thrust.

The designer of the Vickers Viscount was the legendary,

if somewhat tight-lipped, George Edwards.

It was clear to us as far back as 1945,

that this was a great advance on anything that had gone before.

An ordinary, conventional engine vibrates

because of the pistons jumping up and down inside it.

Imagine what 14 pistons must do in just one engine

running at 25,000 piston movements a minute.

The propeller turbine, on the other hand,

has no up-and-down moving parts such as pistons or valves.

This is how it works.

Air is drawn in at the front, compressed in the compressor

and pushed into the combustion chamber.

There it's heated and it rushes through the turbine.

The turbine drives the compressor and in turn a propeller.

The exhaust provides jet propulsion so that no power is wasted.

So we designed an aeroplane to give us speed, range, economy

and four-engine reliability.

We built it and we called it the Viscount.

I name this aircraft Discovery.

-May God bless her and all who fly with her.

-Hip, hip, hurray!

The first aircraft had entered service in 1950,

well ahead of schedule.

The nursing mother of the Viscount was BEA, British European Airways.

The Viscount was funded by them and tightly designed around their needs.

But its performance and comfort proved enduringly popular

with airlines and passengers all around the world.

Nowadays, people have no idea, because they've never flown in a propeller driven aircraft,

how incredibly noisy and uncomfortable they are.

Bumpy and constant vibration.

Suddenly, with the Viscount, all that went and they were flying higher

because it was a pressurised cabin, above the weather.

It was smooth, it was wonderful and passengers just loved it.

-We're off!

-Isn't it super?

REPORTER: This 50-seater medium ranged airliner,

with a cruising speed of 312 miles an hour,

is powered by four turbo propeller engines.

She is here seen flying with three of them.

The Viscount is arguably the most successful British airliner ever built.

Maybe not in numbers, but as far as success around the world.

REPORTER: The American visitors were so impressed with the workmanship, economy and design

that they signed a contract for three of the aircraft to the value of over a million pounds

and what's more, they have taken an option on a further 37.

The Viscount will be the first British airliner

on a scheduled service in America.

As Americans did not have a turboprop of their own,

the Viscount was the ideal aircraft

to take on the all-important US market.

Not only did capital airlines fly the Viscount,

they also admired its virtues in that warming, homespun way that only Americans can fake.

Yes, it's a new standard of service. Capital Airlines' Viscount.

If you've been riding in the cockpit of aeroplanes as long as I have,

it's a real thrill to see a plane like the Viscount come along.

It's tops with the pilots.

Capital Airlines is proud of over a quarter of a century

of serving air-minded America

and we're extremely proud to be the first carrier

in the United States to introduce the Viscount, with its four engines.

The Viscount also proved its worth in the harshest conditions.

Captain Ron MacDonald was a pilot for Trans-Canada Air.

Most of my flying was in the Maritimes, which we call in Canada,

which is New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

The weather, of course, was quite atrocious at times,

in the Maritimes, but the Viscount was an extremely stable aircraft

to make an approach on,

so that you can get her down in 200 foot ceilings of heavy rain or snow

and it was an excellent aeroplane

for the environment that we had to use it in.

We had become the top airline in North America,

using the best equipment that was available.

The Viscount, with its Rolls-Royce Dart engines

was an instant hit with the passengers.

Smooth enough not to shake the Babycham,

quiet enough to have a conversation.

And with windows large enough to watch the world go by.

-These must be the Alps.

-Let me see!

Don't jump about!

You can see quite clearly. The window's bigger than you are.

By the end of its production, over 450 Viscounts would fly worldwide for 80 airlines.

A great British plane.

But the key thing about it was,

it did what it was supposed to do,

which is why a fairly large number of passengers fairly economically,

because it was a turboprop rather than a pure jet,

from Stuttgart to London or from Arizona to Nebraska or whatever.

Which is why the plane sold in America.

The Americans didn't have a plane which could do that job.

The Viscount was a short haul aircraft.

On the long haul transatlantic passenger routes,

it was the Americans who still dominated.

They used mass production, piston-driven aircraft that were modelled on World War II technology.

Their Constellation was developed from a wartime military transport.

While the Superfortress bomber became the Boeing Stratocruiser.

The Stratocruiser could carry 55 passengers

and had, as a feature, a spiral staircase down to a cocktail bar.

In the '50s, even Britain's intercontinental airline BOAC,

the British Overseas Airways Corporation,

flew Uncle Sam's planes.

But American technology was old technology. Noisy, '40s technology.

Britain had the jet

and with our next big jet-powered aircraft of the '50s,

it looked as if we would land the killer blow.

REPORTER: Britain's aircraft may have a winner in the Comet.

I quote the sober view of aviation critics.

The de Havilland company have produced

this four-engine jet airliner, the first in the world,

largely from experiments carried out on the little 108.

The pilots are famous war ace Cunningham and Johnny Wilson.

Cunningham talks to Sir Frank Whittle on the left, the inventor of the jet.

No airliner came close to the Comet's beauty or speed,

the distinctive whistle of its ghost engines thrilling the crowd wherever it went.

It was a jetliner that could travel twice as high

and twice as fast as anything else.

Smooth and high above the weather, it was a transportive delight

and at least five years ahead of anything proposed by our rivals.

It was the shape of things to come.

Suddenly, out of very often things

which were little more than sheds and garages and fairly rundown buildings,

people had conceived the future.

A completely new way of flying

and a completely new way of looking at aeroplanes.

What struck me about it was

you looked at this magnificent silver aircraft

and you looked at the surroundings of the silver aircraft,

which are chaps in cloth caps,

ancient movie cameras trying to film this plane,

in the middle of it is something that is utterly timeless.

To make the vision reality,

de Havilland needed sales in volume and that meant getting the backing

of the state-funded British Overseas Airways Corporation.

Only they could guarantee the Comet's success.

There were plenty of reasons for caution.

For one thing, air routes all over the world were only equipped to handle aeroplanes

travelling about half the speed and half the height of a Comet.

Of course there were plenty of reasons for caution

but get sufficient numbers of the new aircraft into service quickly

and Britain might, at one stroke,

find herself years ahead of her competitors.

The Comet was stunning when it first emerged.

It had been kept secret, under wartime levels of secrecy,

until it rolled out in July 1949

and then, of course, it caused a sensation.

It was so new, so sleek, so silver, so beautiful.

The Comet, with its signature square windows and rakishly swept wings,

shrank the globe.

The first four-jet airliner, Britain's already famous Comet,

made worldwide news by its astonishing flight to North Africa and back.

This wonderful machine's total time in the air

for a distance of just under 3,000 miles

was a mere six hours, 38 minutes.

De Havilland's test pilot, John Cunningham,

was the quintessential company man, always facing every interview with a broad, innocent smile.

And it gave us an average speed,

from take-off to flying over the airfield at the other end,

of about 450 miles an hour.

London to Copenhagen in one hour, 18 minutes.

The newspapers of the time, free of any doubt,

proclaimed the Comet as a world-beater.

Karachi, flying time, ten hours, 21 minutes.

It was at a time when I went off to interview John Cunningham.

He told me that soon after he first flew it,

a test pilot from Lockheed,

and Lockheed, at the time, was one of the principal American aircraft manufacturers,

Cunningham took that Lockheed pilot up in the Comet to 30,000 feet.

The Lockheed pilot was completely blown away by it.

He said, "I cannot believe this plane. This is unbelievable."

And it was. It represented the future.

And for a country which had run out of money,

which Britain had at the end of the '40s,

a country whose achievements were vast and largely in the past

and whose present was one of being in hock to the Americans for evermore,

this suddenly seemed to represent a get out of austerity easily.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons why the Comet was so important then.

I remember going to Heathrow,

dragging my mother to Heathrow, to see the Comet

when the old Northside passenger terminals were canvas tents, mostly.

And then this wonderful silver apparition with the BOAC markings,

whining as it rolled by.

This great howl from the ghost engines.

Took your breath away. It was so lovely, so smooth. Terrific.

Sir Miles Thomas, chairman of BOAC, greeted the Queen

and Duke of Edinburgh at London's British Industries Fair.

The Royal attention focused on a scale model Comet,

for a few days before, this record-breaking aircraft

had again made the front pages by going into regular service

as the world's first passenger-carrying jet airline.

The Comet's first scheduled service was the air mail run

down to Rome and on to Africa

and the dominions of the Empire to set down finally in Johannesburg.

Excuse me, gentleman.

We shall be arriving at Ciampino Airport, Rome,

in about five minutes.

There will be an airport official to meet you and take you

to the restaurant, where you will be served with afternoon tea.

In London operations room,

news of the Comet's landing was flashed from Rome.

-What time did they arrive there?

-1533.

-1533. One minute late.

-Could you put it up for me, please?

-Yes. Certainly.

As we approached Entebbe, we saw Lake Victoria beneath us.

A 200-mile stretch of shimmering water

right at the end of the runway.

Before we reached Livingstone,

Captain Marston came in to see how we were getting along.

It may be a bit turbulent.

I don't guarantee it every time!

ENGINE ROAR DROWNS SPEECH

Oh, well, that's not too bad, is it?

It shows it's all very smooth, this flight, isn't it?

And as I was searching my mind for the words to describe

this completely new experience in flying,

our destination came into view

and below us lay the great blocks of city buildings

and the golden slag heaps from the mines.

The roots of Empire were still vital.

Yes, the writing was on the wall.

It was clearly going to be axed, slowly or quickly, nobody quite new.

India had already gone in '47.

But we had large areas of the planet to control

and military to get out there and to service

and civil servants and all the rest of it.

So, right to the Far East, right down to the south,

southern tip of Africa, we had to preserve air routes.

Orders started to pour in from Air France,

Air India, Japan, Venezuela and Brazil

and even from the United States.

But then curious accidents started to happen

that had not featured during Cunningham's testing.

This Comet belly-landed on Rome's Ciampino airfield at takeoff.

Not one of the 36 passengers or crew of six was hurt,

a fact which reflects credit on the jet airliner,

as well as on the coolness and skill of its pilot.

The design of the Comet's wings appeared vulnerable

to stalling on takeoff, a problem known as over rotation.

The pilots could actually raise the nose of the aircraft

too high on takeoff, which disturbed the airflow into the engine,

it dropped its efficiency

and also disturbed the airflow over the wings and that killed the lift.

Conversely, if you didn't rotate enough,

you just never took off at all.

You remained in ground effect. So it was very tricky.

John Cunningham, one of the finest test pilots in the world,

he knew the aeroplane so well

that he never got himself into an over rotate position.

But on a dark, rainy night, which airline pilots work in,

test pilots very rarely do, the situation is quite different.

The first accident seemed like straightforward pilot error

but then one of Ron MacDonald's Canadian friends,

Captain Charles Pentland, crashed on takeoff in Karachi,

killing all on board.

Everybody thought that Charlie was the one man that would never

get himself into this situation.

Unfortunately, over rotation occurred

and the aircraft never left the ground.

It just went off the runway and blew up and killed everybody.

So it was apparently maybe the instrumentation

didn't give you the degrees of pitch that you required,

which we had on later aircraft.

The real problem with the Comet was that, being a jet aircraft,

it was much less forgiving than propeller-driven aircraft.

Mostly because you don't have the slipstream going back over

the control surfaces until it's already reached quite a fast speed.

The problem is that all the people who flew it

and all the people who maintained it

were still thinking vaguely of the propeller era.

They didn't realise that the jet era was something totally different.

While de Havilland set about addressing

the problems of the Comet, their competitors, Bristol,

had come up with an aircraft to challenge the Americans on the transatlantic routes.

Bristol needed fuel efficiency so they chose the turboprop.

This new aircraft they called the Britannia.

REPORTER: The age of the second Elizabeth,

bringing with it craftsmanship that leads the designs of the world.

Bristol Britannia was actually a rather beautiful looking plane.

It was also, in theory, a plane the world needed.

It was a turboprop but it was quite fast.

350, 400 miles an hour.

It could deliver quite a lot of passengers

and it could deliver them over quite a long distance.

So in some ways, at that time,

it seemed, from a British standpoint, quite a good idea.

REPORTER: The Britannia. The airliner of tomorrow.

The plane's first public appearance

had been at Farnborough in September 1952.

The test pilot was the vastly experienced Bill Pegg,

the man who had first flown the ill-fated Brabazon.

REPORTER: A lovely, graceful machine.

It ranks as a milestone equal to the regular services of the Comet.

Spectators were astounded at the quietness of the plane

and it was soon nicknamed the "Whispering Giant".

The forerunner of a fleet on order

for the British Overseas Airways Corporation was the star,

the 100-seater Bristol Britannia turboprop liner.

The Britannia gave a striking foretaste of the future in a year of aviation history.

But here, too, problems started to appear.

There were persistent teething faults with the Bristol Proteus engines.

Bill Pegg, who has Bristol's chief test pilot,

was showing some KLM people, potential customers,

how the Britannia worked and all the rest of it

and took off for a flight from Filton

and flew them up over South Wales.

At one point,

one of the engines developed a serious fault and caught fire.

Eventually, the entire wing was in flames

and knowing that there were 2,000 gallons of fuel in it,

Bill Pegg was a little alarmed about this

and I think the KLM people were, too.

Obviously, you couldn't do a crash landing in the mountains of Wales.

My father was sitting in the back with one of the KLM personnel.

The other one was in the right-hand seat, Pegg in the left-hand seat.

I would rather not refer to it as a terrible crash in the

River Severn of the Britannia in February 1954.

It, in fact, was a controlled forced landing after an engine fire

developed in number three.

The fire had been raging for about 20 minutes

and they were quietly working out

how long the structural integrity

and systems would continue to operate on the starboard wing.

What they were frightened of was that the fire would be so intense,

because it was fanned by the slipstream,

that it would actually start melting the main spar,

at which point, the whole wing folds up.

The whole lot of them would die.

So he had to get to the ground as quickly as possible

and over the Severn, he could see that the estuary tide was out.

He landed on the mud flat and they slid about 400 yards and then turned

slightly towards the sea and came to a halt and the fire was out,

because the engines had inhaled so much mud, it had stopped the fire.

Everybody came out perfectly unscathed and all the rest of it,

and congratulated Bill Pegg.

There was relief when they got out but that's about it.

I have to say that KLM did not buy the aircraft.

Meanwhile, for the Comet, the world's only jet liner,

things had gone from bad to much worse.

REPORTER: This is the tragic scene of the Comet disaster near Calcutta.

Wreckage of the aircraft smashed almost beyond recognition.

At the time of this terrible accident,

the aircraft carried 37 passengers and a crew of six.

All lost their lives.

The reputation of the world's most celebrated aircraft

now hung in the balance.

There is a curious tone in the British press at the time.

You will find people... It almost seems to come over

that it's your patriotic duty to fly in a Comet.

There are articles in which they suggest the plane may be sabotaged.

Within six weeks, with typical British aplomb,

two plucky Royals were dispatched to Rhodesia on, of course, a Comet.

The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were at London airport

only a few hours after their return from Scotland to see Queen Elizabeth,

the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret

off on their flight to Southern Rhodesia.

And then tragedy struck on a grand scale.

In January 1954 and again in April, two Comets fell from the skies

into the Mediterranean, killing all crew and passengers.

The first had been the very plane that had set records

on that inaugural flight to Johannesburg.

35 people were on board, including ten children,

and there were no survivors.

It was imperative that the cause of the disaster should be known.

Underwater television cameras,

built by scientists and technicians in a number of days,

were rushed to the scene and operated by the Royal Navy.

The wrecked aircraft was located and salvage operations began.

Brought ashore, too, were the infinitely moving reminders

of those whose lives were lost in this disaster of the air.

When I was at school, I must have been around 11 or 12,

I received an Air Mail letter from my uncle who was in Hong Kong.

And it was almost illegible because it was all water stained

and the address had run and everything

and it turned out that it had been on one of the Comets

that had crashed in the Mediterranean

and it was one of the letters they have managed to fish out and deliver.

It was very strange and slightly uncanny, slightly spooky,

which I think is probably why I never actually kept it.

The Comet fleet was immediately grounded,

pending a full scale investigation.

All foreign orders were cancelled.

Barely a year after the fanfares,

it seemed as if the Last Post had sounded for the Comet.

At the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, they pieced together

the remains of the wreckage and forensically analysed the results.

This was the most painstaking

and thorough safety examination in British aviation history.

When the Comet was grounded as a result of the accident,

they had no idea as to why, because, of course, there were no black boxes

or anything like that in those days.

They took a Comet fuselage down to Farnborough

and subjected it to constant cycles of pressure in a water tank.

REPORTER: After it had been filled, jacks beneath the wings

caused a series of bumps as if in flight

and internal pressure was raised in the fuselage.

After the equivalent of 5,000 three-hour flights,

metal fatigue resulted in cracks and brakes.

They discovered that a crack had formed

in a communications aerial at the corner of it,

up near the cockpit above it.

Then that had spread along the corners of the windows.

Of course, it had all happened in an absolute split second.

These key points of the Comet's fuselage

had been put under unbearable strain

by repeated ascents and descents at high altitude.

The Comet's metal skin had failed

just forward of its distinctive square windows.

Then the cabin had exploded from the rapid decompression.

And they did several slow motion films of a mock-up of this happening

and they realised that the sudden decompression,

death would have been instantaneous for all of the passengers.

With seats being simply torn out and turned upside down.

The whole inside of the cabin becomes a complete maelstrom

of bodies and seats and everything

and that would have happened in a fifth of a second, less.

Hindsight is always a wonderful thing and it would be easy for us

to look back at the disasters the Comet faced in the early 1950s

and say, "We can see what was wrong.

"It had oblong windows with square edges

"instead of circular windows or oval windows.

"Of course, these would break up and there would be metal fatigue."

Well, what did people know? They didn't know that.

We can be clever now but remember, the Comet was brand-new.

It was a new type of aircraft.

A very, very high-speed passenger jet.

One had never been built before.

New metals, new stress skins on aircraft, this is all new stuff

and the designers were entering a new dimension.

Mistakes could be made.

More than ever, Britain needed the turboprop Bristol Britannia to succeed.

But engine icing problems and the new,

more rigorous Air Ministry safety testing

pushed the plane further and further behind schedule.

REPORTER: This is called a drop test.

The wheel is spun up and the whole assembly is then forced to the ground.

In 1957, the Britannia finally made passenger service,

a full five years after its promising debut.

REPORTER: Her teething troubles over,

the long-range Bristol Britannia goes to work in a big way.

The skipper, Albert Maher, on the right, and members of his crew,

are ready at London Airport for the first flight of the new non-stop London to New York schedule.

The fastest transatlantic air service in history.

Carrying 52 passengers,

the "Whispering Giant" is the first British airliner

in regular commercial service on the North American route.

One of the first to fly the Britannia was former RAF pilot

Norman Tebbit, now Lord Tebbit.

Good gracious me!

It's a long time since I've been on one of these.

Bit bigger than the old 100 series that I flew.

This is the 300.

I suppose it looks all very dated now,

with these old-fashioned luggage racks.

Of course, this again is the longer range version

so they've got a couple of bunks

as they flew longer hauls across the North Atlantic

and things of that kind.

And here, onto the flight deck.

Quite a nice navigator's station.

You could sit there quite comfortably, out of everybody's way.

Of course, here we've got a hatch, there.

That's an escape hatch.

And here, the hatch for the sextant, periscopic sextant.

Because we navigated an awful lot in those days by astro.

The great thing about the Britannia was you needed a flight engineer,

fairly heavy, who knew the location of all the switches

and relays down in the hold,

underneath the flight deck, here.

Because this was before smart, modern electronics

and everything was still electromechanical.

So if something stuck and didn't work, got a good engineer,

he would know which bit of the flight deck floor

to jump up and down on to loosen things up!

And here you are.

I was co-pilot and navigator on these things

so I would be sitting up here somewhere.

Oops. Oh, gosh.

Funny, not so easy to get into these seats as it was when I was young.

And a slightly strange control column here.

A funny yoke, not terribly conventional.

Big handful of throttles. This aeroplane was way ahead of the pack.

It was the first really very, very electrical aeroplane.

That had a downside, of course, in that if you lost the electrics,

you were in real big trouble.

That's when this switch came in and basically, it would disconnect

all of the generators and then reconnect them again

and you should get at least some of your electrical services back again.

Of course, it was known, inevitably, as the Jesus Christ switch,

because that was the only occasion when you would use it,

when everybody on the flight deck was saying, "Jesus Christ!"

You would grab it and hopefully, all power would be restored.

Very useful!

It seemed that nothing could stop the long-range turboprop

Britannia from conquering the all-important North American market.

Could the Union Jack fly high again over the good old US of A?

Well, yes, if you believed Bristol's promotional film

but that was quite a big "if".

REPORTER: This is the Britannia.

The largest, most up-to-date turboprop airliner in the world.

Mr Peter Masefield, managing director of Bristol Aircraft Ltd,

heading a team of executives, engineers and technicians,

introduced the Britannia to the major airline bases

in 14 cities of America

in an unprecedented 24,000 mile tour of the United States and Canada.

This "Whispering Giant" from England is a real aeroplane. Yes, sir.

I think the Britannia could have been a bigger seller

if it had gone into service earlier

but partly, it would have been limited

by Bristol's own capacity to produce in large numbers.

Howard Hughes was interested in ordering the Britannia for TWA.

He actually flew it secretly one morning on his own,

after meeting Bristol's test pilots out in America

and came back and said that if he could have 25 aeroplanes

in 18 months or whatever it was, he would order it on the spot for TWA.

But Bristol were unable to commit to producing that

because they didn't have the capacity.

REPORTER: The tour was now over and she returned to London airport

with the assurance that soon her sister ships in number

would be following the trail she successfully blazed

through the skies and across the oceans, to the New World.

Despite the fanfare, the order books told the story.

In the end, there were no American orders.

None.

The idea was that you could build a very successful jet prop plane.

Well, that's great, except that the Americans were thinking,

"We're going to get across the Atlantic in seven hours flat

"from London to New York."

And the Bristol Britannia

would kind of stumble its way there in about 12 hours.

There have been some terrifying miscalculations.

The Britannia was late and when she did get into service,

for the first year of her operation,

only half of the aircraft arrived

within an hour of their scheduled time.

There was an all too public squabble

between the BOAC and the Bristol company.

The real problem was that the BOAC didn't want it.

So they kept on badmouthing it.

BOAC actually sort of bigged up the safety issue

of icing in the engines long after it had been solved

and they were actually making this public.

It was extraordinary for an aircraft they were contracted to buy.

BOAC didn't want the turboprop Britannia,

they wanted a pure jet and an American one.

They'd taken a shine to Boeing 707.

The Americans had joined the jetliner race.

Britain no longer had the skies to herself.

What chance do you think we have of capturing the world market

with this long-range jet?

The resources of the Americans are greater.

Their jet aeroplanes are going to be backed up by big military contracts

and Boeing have already got a pretty big tanker contract for the 707.

But despite that, I still think we are capable of producing

an aeroplane as good as they are.

Why? What compensating advantage have we?

Well, there is never any substitute for brains,

even though it isn't supported by a great mass of equipment,

as it is over there.

We have this experience on the Comet,

for which, again, there is no substitute.

And the Comet will clearly become an aeroplane again and will work again.

De Havilland did indeed rise to the challenge.

In October 1958,

the new Comet 4 came into service to take on the Americans.

She immediately became the first pure jet liner

to cross the Atlantic.

The redesign had thicker alloy for the fuselage

and the vulnerable square windows were replaced by oval ones.

Lord Brabazon, at the public enquiry into the Comet,

you said that in every step in progress,

we have had to pay for it in blood and treasure

and God knows that in this case, we have paid in full.

-Do you still feel that way?

-I do, indeed.

It was a most expensive but a very imaginative product

and we paid for it but good will come from it,

because on the back of our experience

and on the back of what was learned in that enquiry,

other great machines in the world have been built

and are flying today.

The new Comet was twice as large

and twice as powerful, with its Rolls-Royce Avon engines.

The Comet had pioneered jet travel and now defined an age.

-And your name?

-Lord Kimberley.

-Are you travelling for business or for pleasure?

-Business.

It's one of the smoothest flights I've been on.

Far less tiring and really is the tops.

I think it's wonderful because it's very silent,

it's very quick and you also get the most wonderful view.

Were you at all nervous about taking this flight?

Oh, not at all. Not a bit. Why should I be?

With government encouragement,

BOAC did order 16 of the new planes and other sales

went to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America.

The Comet 4 was the definitive version

of the most adventurous aircraft in all civil aviation history.

As the late summers of the '50s came to an end,

Britain's love affair with aircraft continued under Hampshire skies.

It seemed that men in sheds could make the most improbable possible.

And perhaps the most glorious of these was the Fairey Rotodyne,

a mongrel mix of autogyro and turbo jet.

It can go faster than a helicopter

and slower than a fixed wing aeroplane.

I think it's one of the most

brilliant pieces of advanced engineering

we've seen for a very long time.

It is a new way of flying.

Brilliant idea, and it was well engineered.

What they hadn't taken into account was the atrocious noise.

The jets on the tips of the rotor,

they could stop a conversation at two miles.

It was intolerable. There was no way.

It was a nice idea to have somebody flying you in from Heathrow

to the South Bank or something, very convenient for the city,

but it was obviously just not possible to use the thing,

so it was axed.

The industry, too, was becoming increasingly mismatched.

The designs were brilliant and many.

The sales were few.

The government needed to step in to rationalise the business if it was to succeed.

We were trying to cover all the different specifications

on the military and civil sides.

There were a large number of British firms and they were all too small.

That's one of the reasons many of the aircraft were delayed.

The teams weren't big enough to do the job.

In a series of painful forced marriages,

Rolls-Royce emerged as the leading engine manufacturer

and the 20 aerospace companies were whittled down to two main groups,

Hawker Siddeley and BAC, the British Aircraft Corporation.

It would be down to BAC to mount the final British challenge

to Boeing for the big jet market.

In 1962, a new British star took to the air - polished, refined,

with a licence to thrill.

It was Britain's final riposte to the brash Americans.

It was powerful, Savile Row suited, the name was VC, VC10.

The VC10 was a magnificent aircraft. There should be no question about that.

It looks absolutely superb, whether you see it on film or in the ten.

It's a delight. It's a piece of aviation sculpture. There was something thrilling in the way it

took off like a jetfighter, rather than a lumbering Airbus of today.

VC10, romance in the sky, adventure, Boy's Own, Dan Dare, the Eagle.

All those things, utterly thrilling.

The VC10 does do a very different job to the Boeing.

It's been designed to operate out of the short airfields with

high temperature conditions which are so important to large airlines

like the OAC on the Commonwealth routes.

Why was it necessary to come into this market?

The big jet market is a great part of the airline scene

and I think if we are to preserve the aircraft industry,

which is a great national asset, it exports perhaps £150 million

per year, we need to develop an aircraft like the VC10.

The last of the all-British great jets has to be the VC10.

And this was a final riposte to the Americans. They brought us the 707,

which, for decades, was going to dominate aviation.

We hit back with a plane

which was much more sophisticated in its design.

The VC10 looked wonderful.

It had its engines at the back, so the cabin was supremely quiet.

It was fast.

It's still a world record holder for a subsonic airliner flight.

It was quick, comfortable and it could go almost anywhere.

It's astonishing,

but 50 years later, only Concorde has crossed the Atlantic faster

than our last great passenger jet.

I do this trip from Nairobi to London every year and this is

by far the most quiet and most comfortable one I can remember.

The VC10 was deeply loved by passengers.

That was a great selling point. It's very seldom you get people coming off

aircraft saying, what a wonderful aircraft that was, but they did on the VC10.

People would ask to fly on it.

They would postpone their flights if they couldn't.

I think it's an extremely comfortable plane. Very smooth.

Very quiet. The seating is most comfortable and plenty of legroom.

It seems to travel so serenely.

When you hit turbulence,

it doesn't ride turbulence

like other airlines.

It has a very stiff wing, so it doesn't juggle you about,

like the average aircraft.

And, of course, the one advantage the aeroplane always had that made it

so successful was the fact that the engines were on the tail.

Of course, consequently, it is a very quiet interior.

Also, for a nervous person who doesn't really like flying,

it could take off two-thirds quicker than a 707, so you were 1,000 feet

above the runway when the 707 was still sitting on it.

The VC10 was sold on its passenger experience

and part of this was down to the cabin crew.

They also preferred the aircraft to the 707.

When you compared it to the 707,

which I also went on for a short period, it was the most amazing

aircraft because it was neat, it was small, it was very fast

and it is only 144 passengers, but it was the latest jet plane

that everyone was quite excited to fly in.

The 707 was much noisier and also the landing, I always thought

was a controlled crash all the time.

Bang! Bang! Down the runway.

The VC10 was very smooth, it glided off, glided down. It was very smooth.

I think the passengers preferred the VC10.

The hostesses may have loved the aircraft,

but were not always so keen on the designer uniforms.

Paper dresses were on this route.

I'm sure it was New York down to the Caribbean.

You were issued with this paper dress.

In New York, even if it was snowing, you trot onto the aircraft,

we had these big raincoats, but when you took it off, you were wearing this paper dress.

They were more or less all the same size. They had a string at the back.

If you had any bust, it struck straight out in front.

They had to be two or three inches above the knee,

you were supposed to wear them. We were issued with tights.

And all the boys used to get the scissors out and try and cut them shorter and shorter.

Green plastic shoes with plastic jewels on and a flower in your hair.

-Hideous.

-Horrendous.

And a row of three VC10s and you don't know which one you were on,

you trot up the steps and say, "Are you going down the Caribbean?" all shy and flustered.

And they'd say, "Why?" You go like this!

"No, no. It's not this one, dear, it's that one."

Yet once again, Britain was making a technically advanced aircraft

to the specifications of one company.

A company, BOAC, that was often referred to

as the "Boeing Only Aircraft Corporation"...

..such was its addiction to buying the Seattle jet.

No British aircraft could succeed without the backing

of the state airlines and relying on that could be a pact with the devil.

The BBC's Money Programme interviewed Britain's own Dr No,

the chairman of BOAC.

He damned the VC10 with faint praise.

It's a lovely aeroplane to fly, I've flown it myself.

I think it has one little drawback and that is that you have to get

an awful lot of extra people in it before it makes money.

It's a really sad story that the BOAC, who specified the aeroplane,

turned against it when they realised

that the 707 was actually more economical to fly.

The reason it was more economical to fly

was because the 707 had been built for very long runways.

The VC10 had been designed specifically for BOAC's requirement

to get out of shorter runways at high altitude

in places like Nairobi on the Empire routes.

It had a bigger wing, with high-lift devices,

and the tail-mounted engines.

This made it heavier and therefore burned a bit more fuel.

So BOAC actually tried to get out of part of their VC10 order

in order to buy more 707s, which didn't really help its image

with the rest of the world when you were trying to sell it to other airlines.

The airline corporations were more or less strong-armed into buying British.

They had probably an excessive influence on the design

of the aircraft because they were tailored for their needs

without looking at the wider world as a market.

The aircraft were too closely tailored,

and then inevitably, minds changed,

commerce developed and the airlines didn't then really quite want

what they'd said they wanted.

And in the end, airlines tend to go for operating costs

and reliability, rather than the last bit of perfection.

The American 707 went on to sell over 1,000.

The British VC10, a mere 54.

A proud line of all British big jets to challenge the Americans

had come to an end.

And in 1966, the final sad twist.

The Farnborough airshow, so long the best of British, went international.

'For the first time, foreign aircraft are on show at Farnborough.

'Bristol Siddeley powers four of them, an Orpheus engine

'in the Fiat jet trainer in air force service with Italy and Germany.'

The hard truth was that there were simply not enough British planes

to fill our top show.

'Rolls-Royce is sponsoring three overseas aircraft, the Fokker

'Friendship with two Rolls turbo props is an airliner from Holland.'

A wonderful creative age was drawing to a close.

For so many years, Farnborough had been a showcase of British aviation, civil and military.

The skies were full of the fastest and highest,

the most menacing,

and the most adventurous.

There was a great deal of very good design in Britain at that time,

but in the end, we just simply didn't have the capacity, the people,

the finances, to do all the things that we were trying.

Perhaps we were trying to do too many things

and not really carry forward enough of them.

It was so nearly a bloody great era, but it was screwed up

by lousy management, hideously missed political decisions

and also bad specification on the part of the airlines.

But what is often overlooked

is that we are still a major aerospace player.

In fact, we're number one in Europe and people don't realise that.

We're second only to the United States in terms of aerospace.

But there were some wonderful aircraft. The Comet.

It should have been the greatest thing ever. For two years, it was.

Passengers thought it really was.

The Americans themselves thought it had left them six years behind.

Very sad. But wow, there were some great aircraft!

For two decades, we had ruled the skies

and consistently broken records with amazing aircraft

that were loved by crew and passengers alike.

We had the first turbo-prop plane, the world-beating Vickers Viscount.

The first jetliner, the sleek silver De Havilland Comet.

And the VC10, powerful and athletic

and still an Atlantic record holder.

In that golden age of invention and confidence,

Britain had created magnificent planes.

Aircraft that changed the way that the world would fly forever.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd