Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. I won't cover turboprops, because I'd like to finish this before I die of old age. I won't cover business jets. It has to be a civilian commercial passenger transport with a capacity of at least thirty passengers, and I won't cover purely military jets. If you want to read about the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, you'll have to go somewhere else.
The C-5 is a fascinating aircraft, though. In the early 1960s the United States Army issued a requirement for a large, long-range strategic transport. Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed submitted designs, with Lockheed winning out because their proposal was cheapest. The resulting aircraft was enormous, with a cargo bay that could carry two main battle tanks or half a dozen attack helicopters, plus eighty passengers in a deck that ran along the aircraft's spine. It had a door in the nose, necessitating a high-mounted cockpit, plus a second door in the tail.
Unfortunately Lockheed was overwhelmed by the development effort, with costs overrunning by more than a billion dollars. The C-5 sounded great on paper, but the resulting aircraft compared poorly with contemporary freighter versions of the Boeing 747. In its favour the C-5 could use poor-quality airfields - it had twenty-eight low-pressure tyres, and a high-mounted wing that kept the engines away from ground debris - but in practice that capability was used only once in a blue moon. The C-5 was too large and precious to ferry tanks directly to the battlefield.
The C-5 was also designed to take off from relatively short runways, which meant that the engines and airframe were optimised for high thrust rather than long range. On the positive side the C-5 could carry slightly more cargo than a contemporary 747-200, but it could only cross the Atlantic with a full load if it was refuelled in mid-air, while the 747 could fly from the United States to Europe fully-loaded. Lockheed came up with a proposal for a civilian variant, the L-500, which attracted no interest from airlines on account of its poor fuel economy. Lockheed also submitted the C-5 to NASA as a potential Space Shuttle carrier aircraft, but NASA opted for a modified Boeing 747 instead.
A high-profile crash during the tail end of the Vietnam War, caused by a malfunction of the rear loading door, led to a restriction on C-5 operations for several months, and to make things worst Lockheed had miscalculated the fatigue loading of the wings, which required an expensive wing replacement programme in the early 1980s. All of this explains why, despite its huge size and capability, the C-5 was never adopted by military forces outside the United States and never had a second life as a civilian cargo aircraft.
Despite its poor reputation the C-5 filled a niche, and in the 1980s Lockheed was even commissioned to make a run of brand-new C-5B models, with improved engines and simpler landing gear. In the years that followed the remaining aircraft were upgraded with glass cockpits and more fuel-efficient powerplants, and as of 2024 around fifty C-5s remain in service, all with the United States. It's a popular draw at airshows on account of its huge size, and it's a good example of the kind of aircraft I will not be writing about.
I'm going to do this in alphabetical order, grouping each manufacturer's planes together, with Airbus and Boeing at the end, because you'd get bored otherwise. I won't write about prototypes that never entered service, with one exception.
Why am I doing this? My blog is ostensibly about photography, but by far the most popular post is this run-down of ultra-long-haul airliners from the immediate pre-COVID era, so why the heck not. Sources? I will be using them. And occasionally acknowledging them. Yes, I am aware of Greg Goebel's fantastic AirVectors, but I am my own man.
AVRO CANADA (Canada)
Let's start with the Avro Canada C.102 Jetliner. Why? Because it has a memorable name, and it's an interesting what-if. Avro Aircraft was founded in the United Kingdom in 1910, only seven years after the Wright Brothers first took to the air. In 1935 it became a subsidiary of the Hawker Siddeley group, which is spelled with two Ds and then E-L-E, Siddeley.
During the Second World War the British aviation industry funded a number of shadow factories across the British Commonwealth, safe from enemy action. One such, Victory Aircraft of Ontario, Canada, was bought up outright by Hawker Siddeley in the post-war years and renamed Avro Canada. At first the company was very successful. In the late 1940s it developed Canada's only home-grown jet fighter, the Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck, and went on to make almost seven hundred of them, with foreign sales to the Belgian Air Force.
Sadly Avro ran into some of the same problems that affected the British aviation industry, specifically a combination of political interference from the government plus stiff competition from the United States.
In 1945 Trans-Canada Airlines released a specification for a high-speed airliner with a capacity of around fifty passengers that could serve Canadian and North American routes. Avro came up with with a sleek, compact aircraft with two Rolls-Royce Avon engines buried in the wings, in a way that vaguely resembled early models of the Boeing 737, but with more engines. The single prototype was never fitted out completely, but Avro envisaged a passenger load of around 36-40 people.
At the time the Avon was only certified for military use, so Avro redesigned the aircraft to use four Rolls-Royce Derwents instead, which had less thrust. The result was an aircraft that was crippled from the outset with a poor range of just over 1,000 miles with a full passenger load. This restricted it to routes inside Canada and the United States, not necessarily a terminal problem given the great size of the US domestic market, but this was the late 1940s, and domestic airlines were wary of jets. They were too new, too expensive, too untested, and there was a glut of piston-powered airliners left over from the war.
The prototype first flew in 1949, and by all accounts it was a good design that flew well. But it was a dead end. Trans-Canada Airlines had doubts about the economics of jet engines, and eventually they gave up on the project. The Canadian government had tentatively planned to buy Jetliners as transports for the Royal Canadian Air Force, but instead they opted for the much more capable De Havilland Comet instead, pulling their support for the Jetliner in late 1951. Avro managed to catch the eye of US entrepreneur Howard Hughes, who was sufficiently impressed with the design to consider making it under licence in the United States, but despite coming up with a tentative plan to have Convair build the thing nothing came of it.
The Canadian government was also worried that the Jetliner was going to draw resources away from the CF-100 Canuck - a hot political issue given the Korean War - so with no commercial prospects and indifference from the government Avro sold off the prototype in 1956 for scrap. A few years later exactly the same thing happened to Avro's next project, the C-105 Arrow interceptor, after which Avro Canada soldiered on for a decade before being absorbed into Hawker Siddeley Canada, that's two Ds and then E-L-E. Siddeley.
The general consensus among aviation buffs today is that the Jetliner was too small and short-legged to make economic sense, but it remains an interesting what-if. Avro's sales literature downplayed the Canadian aspect, highlighting the fact that the Jetliner was an American aircraft - the adverts proudly described it as "America's First Jet Transport" - and had it entered service in the mid-1950s it would have no doubt brought immense prestige to whichever airline flew it, even if only as a loss leader. It would quickly have become obsolete, but the same is true of all the other first-generation jetliners.
And that's the first episode of "Every Jetliner Ever Made In Alphabetical Order". If you've only learned one thing today, it's how to spell Siddeley. Will the next episode feature Antonov, or will the writer make an excuse to ignore Soviet jetliners and skip directly to BAC?
