May 2, 1952: The beginning of the ‘Jet Age’ — the de Havilland Comet makes its maiden voyage.
118 feet long, 29 feet tall, unassuming in design, the de Havilland Comet that departed London on May 2, 1952, touched down the next day and was greeted at the Palmietfontein Airport in Johannesburg by so many spectators that the pilot wondered what was going on. They were there, Capt. R. C. Alabaster learned after landing, to see the Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner.
Like the Kitty Hawk craft and the Concorde, the Comet seems to represent much more than its own time in the air - the beginning of a new era of travel and communication. In the Western imagination, the Comet shrunk the Atlantic, the sky itself, and the world. In 1989, Tony Fairbrother, a Comet flight test engineer, remarked that “the world changed from the moment its wheels left the ground” in 1949. The Comet 1’s first years of operation were marred by disaster and tragedy, but the Jet Age had, in that moment, arrived: coexisting an age in which atomic energy was supposed to save the world, in which whole suburban communities, homes and lawns, were raised from nothing; soon man would fly in space, and new luxuries, like intercontinental travel, became widely available to the middle class.
When Frank Sinatra sang, in 1957, “There’s a bar in far Bombay / Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away,” they imagined that they just might - and they could.
The de Havilland Comet was a British invention, a peacetime marvel that emerged out of wartime. American aircraft like the Douglas DC-3 and the Boeing Stratocruiser (a descendant of the World War II Superfortress bomber) had already anticipated mass commercial flight through the 1930s and ‘40s, making the idea of travel by air palatable to the average traveller. But the Comet, powered by jet engines instead of propellers, was different — it flew higher, faster, smoother, quieter. The engines themselves were encased in metal, hidden in aerodynamic designs that bespoke the Chevrolet Bel Air in your driveway, or the smooth capsule of a rocket - that is, the modern and the future.
The British hoped to claim a foothold in the burgeoning industry, in which the Americans already claimed several advantages - not least of which included the size of the population (a population of prospective air travelers) and the wartime infrastructure for a peacetime aeronautics industry, ready to cash in.
Within a year the troubles began, and with them the beginning of the end for this short-lived aircraft. Exactly one year after the 1952 London flight, a Comet departing Calcutta was incinerated “in a streak of smoke” in a thunderstorm, along with all 43 people aboard. Investigations into this and other fatal disasters found serious structural issues with the Comet - in the construction of its hull and window, and in its general inability to handle the stress of pressurization.
These accidents repeatedly grounded the early Comet models, and subsequent investigations and periods of commercial idle effectively ended the British rush toward the vanguard of the Jet Age. While de Havilland revamped the Comet (and eventually produced the more durable Comet 4), American companies gained ground, taking note of safety findings and engineering commercial crafts that were even bigger and faster than de Havilland’s latest designs. In 1958 Boeing rolled out, as part of the Pan Am fleet, the Boeing 707.