1 Air Division

The editor’s footnote to the RCAF Comet story in the last Airvibes took me back forty-five years and more, to my own involvement with the Comet, a lovely aeroplane. I was earning my mead as a Surveyor in the Flight Test Section of the Air Registration Board; my position title betrayed the Board’s origins with Lloyds of London, the well-known insurance consortium. Parenthetically, the Board, the airworthiness authority responsible for issuing Design Certificates and Certificates of Airworthiness, was not a government body but a private corporation with its own Board of Directors composed of all the greats of British aviation. Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, Sir Frederick Handley-Page, and so on. It was one of those strange British compromises about which nothing good can be said except that it worked faultlessly, and along the way produced the world’s first supersonic transport requirements, including C of A handling and performance.

As is well known, the Comet was operating in unknown areas of metallurgy and aerodynamics and ended up having its C of A withdrawn after a series of crashes, caused by notch-sensistivity of the very high-strength alloys used in the fuselage skin, and a ground stall during the take-off run preventing it from getting airborne. I joined the Board in Brettenham House, London, in November 1955, just as flying on the sole Comet 3 began. G-ANLO (George Able Nan Love Oboe, in that year’s phonetic alphabet) was intended to regain a full C of A for the production Mark 4 Comets destined for BOAC. The Air Minister had announced in the House of Commons that all Comet 4 aircraft for the RAF would carry a full civil C of A, undoubtedly the first time this had ever been a requirement for a service aircraft.

During November and December 1955, the Board’s Chief Test Pilot DP Davies (with the writer as Flight Test Surveyor) flew a Comet 2 modified to current standard, as well as G-ANLO for a restricted category C of A. Subsequently, the Board’s flying of various Comets continued in 1956 thru 1959, including Marks 2, 2E, 2R, C.Mk.2 (RAF), Comets 3 and 3B, and 4 and 4B. The metallurgical fix lay in the domain of the Design Surveyors, but the ground stall was very much on Dave Davies’s mind, and he devised what I referred to as a "proof take-off" which went like this: taxi out to the end of the runway, turn into wind, apply the brakes and increase power on all four to 100%. I can still see Dave then pushing (with exaggerated deliberateness) each individual throttle lever in turn with a stubby Welsh forefinger to demonstrate that we were at full power. With the brakes still fully on, the control yoke was then pulled all the way back to the rear stop -- full up elevator. Only then were the brakes released, and full up elevator maintained until we passed through 50 feet, and this was done at top weight and fully aft e.g. (If there was no ground stall in this configuration, there never would be in any.)

While flying on the Comet, de Havilland’s Chief Test Pilot, John Cunningham, related many interesting tales, e.g. it seems that English Electric and the RAF were in the habit of making supersonic interceptions of Comets on test, and the shock wave produced an audible slap against the Comet fuselage.

The world’s first transatlantic jetliner flights with fare-paying passengers were made simultaneously on 4th October 1959 by G-APDC (Captain RE Millichap) westbound, and G-APDB (Captain TB Stoney) eastbound. In 1999, forty years after my last flying with Dave Davies, I visited him in retirement near the Welsh border, not having seen or communicated with him in the interval. He had total recall of every flight we had ever made together.