page_title: Airliner
section_title: United Kingdom
hierarchical_section_title: Airliner / History / The postwar era / United Kingdom
caption_attribution_description: English: The first prototype de Havilland DH106 Comet at Hatfield. Français&#160;: Le prototype du Comet 1 (avec des hublots carrés) à Hatfield, Hertfordshire, en octobre 1949
context_page_description: An airliner is a type of aircraft for transporting passengers and air cargo. Such aircraft are most often operated by airlines. Although the definition of an airliner can vary from country to country, an airliner is typically defined as an airplane intended for carrying multiple passengers or cargo in commercial service. The largest of them are wide-body jets which are also called twin-aisle because they generally have two separate aisles running from the front to the back of the passenger cabin. These are usually used for long-haul flights between airline hubs and major cities. A smaller, more common class of airliners is the narrow-body or single-aisle. These are generally used for short to medium-distance flights with fewer passengers than their wide-body counterparts.
  Regional airliners typically seat fewer than 100 passengers and may be powered by turbofans or turboprops. These airliners are the non-mainline counterparts to the larger aircraft operated by the major carriers, legacy carriers, and flag carriers, and are used to feed traffic into the large airline hubs. These regional routes then form the spokes of a hub-and-spoke air transport model.
context_section_description: In the United Kingdom, the Brabazon Committee was formed in 1942 under John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara to investigate the future needs of the British Empire's civilian airliner market. The study was an attempt at defining in broad overview, the impact of projected advances in aviation technology, and to forecast the global needs of the postwar British Empire (in South Asia, Africa, and the Near and Far East) and Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand) in the area of air transport, for passengers, mail, and cargo. The crucial problem that the planners faced was that an agreement had been reached between the United States and the United Kingdom in 1942 to split responsibility for building multi-engine aircraft types for British use: the US would concentrate on transport aircraft, while the UK would concentrate on their heavy bombers. This decision meant that the United Kingdom would be left at the close of the war with little experience in the design, manufacture, and final assembly of transport aircraft.
  The final report called for the construction of four general designs studied by the committee and members of the state-owned airlines British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and later British European Airways (BEA). The first three designs were piston-powered aircraft of varying sizes for different markets, while the Type IV design, at the urging of Geoffrey de Havilland, whose company was involved in development the first jet fighters, was for a jet-powered 100-seat design.
  The Type I design, after a brief contest, was given to the Bristol Aeroplane Company, building on submissions they had made during the war for a "100 ton bomber". This evolved into the creation of the Bristol Brabazon.
  The Type II process was complicated by the proposition of Vickers that a move to the newly developed turboprop power should be made. The specification was, therefore, split in two, with the conventional piston design going to the eventual de Havilland Dove and Airspeed Ambassador. The revolutionary VC.2 Viceroy, first flown in 1948, was the first turboprop design anywhere. The Type III requirement was developed as the Avro Tudor.
  The Type IV for the jet-powered aircraft went to de Havilland and became, in 1949, the world's first jet airliner, the Comet. It featured an aerodynamically clean design with four de Havilland Ghost turbojet engines buried in the wings, a pressurised fuselage, and large, square windows. For the era, it offered a relatively quiet, comfortable passenger cabin and showed signs of being a commercial success at its 1952 debut. However, a year after entering commercial service, the Comets began suffering problems, with three of them breaking up during mid-flight in well-publicised accidents. This was later found to be due to catastrophic metal fatigue, not well understood at the time, in the airframes. The Comet was withdrawn from service and extensively tested to discover the cause. Rival manufacturers, meanwhile, heeded the lessons learned from the Comet while developing their own aircraft. Although sales never fully recovered, the improved Comet 2 and the prototype Comet 3 culminated in the redesigned Comet 4 series which debuted in 1958 and had a productive career of over 30 years.
  This disaster, coupled with the fact that the UK's domestic market was much smaller than the US's, meant that by the 1960s, it was increasingly clear that the UK had lost the airliner market to the US, and later designs like the BAC 1-11, Vickers VC10, and Hawker Siddeley Trident although successful would be unable to win a substantial part of it back again. Another committee was formed to consider supersonic designs, STAC, and worked with Bristol to create the Bristol 223 design for a 100-passenger transatlantic airliner. However, this was going to be so expensive to produce that the effort was later merged with similar efforts in France to create the Concorde supersonic airliner.
caption: Prototype of the de Havilland Comet in 1949, the first jet airliner in the world
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