Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order,
but with Airbus and Boeing at the end just to make things real spicy-like.
Today we're going to look at de Havilland of Great Britain and
Sud-Aviation of France. The two companies only produced one jetliner apiece, the de Havilland Comet and the Sud-Aviation Caravelle, but they were two of the very first to enter service, first in the case of the Comet. They were developed in parallel, like brother and sister, and even used some of the same components.
All aircraft are borne of a dream. The Comet and the Caravelle were borne of the post-war dreams of Britain and France. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the two countries still possessed huge colonial empires, but their sun was setting.
Nonetheless Britain and France still hoped to retain their place at the top table, so the two countries developed nuclear weapons, and rockets, and front-wheel-drive cars, and motorways, and jet airliners. On one level the Comet and the Caravelle were very successful. The Comet was the first ever jetliner to enter revenue service and the first to carry paying passengers across the Atlantic, while the Caravelle was an influential sales hit that remained in service into the twenty-first century. But the Comet had a doozy of a design flaw, and the Caravelle was quickly overtaken by competition from Boeing and Douglas, and ultimately the two aircraft remained in service long after their parent companies had bitten the dust.
Meanwhile the aforementioned colonial empires slipped away, and then Airbus happened, but that's another story. I realise in the last article I said I would write about
Douglas. The problem is that I have trouble with letters. It makes sense that
twelve comes after four because twelve is larger. But why
should O come after E?
de Havilland (Great Britain)
I mean, is O larger than E? It takes up more space but it has less ink. I'm digressing here. de Havilland is spelled with a lower case de, then Havilland with two Ls. de Havilland was named after
Geoffrey de Havilland, a talented engineer who founded the company in the
early 1920s after being discharged from war service with the RFC. In the inter-war years de Havilland established its reputation
with the Tiger Moth trainer, and also the Dragon series of airliners. During the Second
World War the company was responsible for the high-speed Mosquito
fighter-bomber-reconnaissance aircraft, and by the end of the war it was deep in development of one of Britain's first jet fighters, the Vampire.
A de Havilland Dragon Express
There's something poignant about de Havilland. The man lived long enough to see two of his three children killed in accidents while test-flying the company's own aircraft. The jetliner that was supposed to secure de Havilland's post-war future - the Comet - ended up killing the company, which was absorbed into Hawker-Siddeley in 1960. de Havilland himself passed away five years later. He was one of those early aviation pioneers who was born in the days before heavier-than-air flight. He lived long enough to not only see the jet age but to help create it. de Havilland's Canadian
subsidiary, de Havilland Canada, still exists as an independent entity, but
it's one of those resurrected brand names that has very little in common with
the original.
I'm going to digress here. Even before victory in the Second World War was
assured the British government was worried about the post-war future of civil
aviation. There was a risk that Britain would end the war with an enormous aviation industry that could only produce obsolete piston-engined bombers. And so in 1942 the government asked a chap called
Lord Brabazon to form a committee and sort things out. Lord Brabazon's real
name was John Moore, but he liked to call himself Lord Brabazon because it
commanded respect.
In the short term the committee believed that Britain's immediate post-war
needs could be met with conversions of bomber aircraft, of which Britain had
no shortage. It sounded good in theory, but the results were disappointing.
Piston-engined bombers had lots of engine power but very little internal
space. The Avro Lancaster could, in theory, lift the weight of around sixty
passengers, but the fuselage was so narrow that the airliner conversion, the
Lancastrian, only had room for around nine people, who had to sit sideways and wear oxygen masks. The Avro York, which was
considerably more advanced than the Lancastrian, had twice the passenger load,
but it was still less fuel-efficient than the popular Douglas DC-3. Nowadays
the Lancastrian is only remembered for its poor accident record while the York
isn't remembered at all.
An Avro Lancastrian
The Brabazon Committee's other solutions were hit-and-miss. The smaller,
short-ranged designs struggled to sell in the face of a post-war glut of
Douglas DC-3s. The giant Bristol Brabazon luxury propliner never entered series production, but the
turboprop-powered Vickers Viscount and Bristol Britannia were popular enough.
By the time Geoffrey de Havilland joined the committee his company was working
on what would become the Vampire jet fighter, so he suggested a pure jet
airliner, initially a fast mailplane, latterly a regular airliner. In 1942,
when the Committee first met, the few jet-powered aircraft were prototypes,
but by 1945 their effectiveness had been proven in combat.
Beyond their high thrust, jet engines have some big advantages over piston
engines. They're more efficient at high altitude, at heights where piston
engines run out of puff. They can cruise above the weather, which does wonders for timekeeping. They have fewer moving
parts, or at least fewer reciprocating parts, which makes for smoother
operation and in theory greater reliability, although it took an awful lot of
work to develop turbine blades that could cope with the high temperatures of
jet operation. Propellers generate draggy vortices when the tips
approach supersonic velocity, which limits their top speed, but the enclosed
blades of jet turbines can rotate much faster.
Early jets had some disadvantages - high fuel consumption, slow throttle
response, a tendency to ice up - but those problems were rapidly solved.
Nonetheless the high altitudes that commercial jets were expected to operate
remained a major issue. At 40,000 feet an airliner's fuselage would have to be
pressurised, which was a new technology in the 1940s. The pre-war Boeing 307
had a pressurised cabin, but it only flew at an altitude of 20,000 feet. The
new breed of jetliners would fly much higher than that.
de Havilland came up with a number of design concepts, which eventually
coalesced into a futuristic-looking swept-wing aircraft with four jet engines
buried in the wing roots. de Havilland's team started work on the Comet in
1946, under a chap called Ronald Bishop, who had been responsible for the
Mosquito. The original plan was for a super-futuristic tailless aircraft with
a highly-swept wing, but erring on the side of caution Bishop eventually picked a more conventional design,
powered by de Havilland Ghost turbojets. At first the Comet was
envisaged as a mailplane with a tiny passenger
load, but during development it grew and grew, until the eventual
configuration had four engines buried in a low-mounted wing, with a passenger
load of around forty people in a two-by-two arrangement.
The first prototype flew in 1949, with limited entry into service in 1952. The launch customer was BOAC, the state-owned airline. The Comet 1 didn't have the range to
cross the Atlantic, so at first it serviced what remained of the British
Empire. It flew around 44 passengers from London, via Rome, via Cairo, on to Johannesburg, or
alternatively off to Tokyo and Hong Kong via what was then Bombay. Flight times from London Airport
(now Heathrow) to Rome were around two and a half hours, surprisingly similar to modern schedules. In contrast BOAC's Lockheed
Constellations took around five and a half hours on the same route, with a
stop at Frankfurt for fuel.
As a generation one product the Comet had a curious mixture of old and new
features. The cockpit had a fourth seat for a dedicated radio operator, who
also operated the navigational equipment, which included a sextant periscope
so that the flight might navigate by the stars. Fuel consumption was such that
most of the initial routes were shuttle affairs, with multiple stops en route
to the final destination, rather than direct there-and-back flights. Today it
takes around fourteen hours to fly from London to Tokyo, but in 1953 BOAC's
Comets took almost two whole days, taking off at 10:00 on Monday and arriving
at 06:30 on Wednesday. It's not so much that the Comet was slow - although the cruising speed of 450mph was around 100mph less than modern airliners - but that it had to keep stopping for fuel every 1,500 miles or so.
In contrast BOAC's Merlin-powered Argonauts took twice as long. By the time
the Comet had touched down in Tokyo, the Argonaut's passengers had only
reached Rangoon. At that point they faced another day in the air, plus a night
stop at Hong Kong, and then a final leg to their destination. I have no idea
how much it would have cost to fly long-range on a Comet.
This chap
suggests that that a late-1940s BOAC ticket from London to Tokyo would have
been the equivalent of £14,000 in modern money, versus around £800 or so for
the same flight nowadays. The high cost of the tickets and the glamorous,
far-off destinations - Rome, Beirut, Singapore - led to the media stereotype
of a Jet Set, wealthy socialites who could afford to fly first-class to
parties across the world. For a year or so Comet operations proceeded as
normal and all was well with the world.
By modern standards the Comet's development cycle was extraordinarily rapid,
from rough paper concept to service in just
six years. Nonetheless de Havilland took great pains to ensure that it would work first
time. There were
worries that embedding the engines together in the wings would be a fire
hazard, so the engines were surrounded with fireproof bulkheads and
armoured panels. Pressurisation was also a major worry. In the words of
Popular Mechanics, writing in 1950, "there can be no taking of chances
on sudden failures that might cook or quick-freeze the customers in a jet
liner or expose them precipitately to oxygen starvation by a cabin 'puncture'
at 40,000 feet". And so de Havilland tested the fuselage in a water tank and
designed the Comet's skin to withstand more than twice the expected loads.
A former RAF Comet 2
There were particular worries about the square windows, but de Havilland
reinforced the surroundings and rounded off the corners, and despite urban
legend the cabin windows themselves were never a particular problem. Metal
fatigue was however a major concern, in part because of Nevil Shute's
No Highway, an early techno-thriller published in 1948. It was filmed in 1951 as No Highway in the Sky, starring
James Stewart as an engineer who believed that a new jetliner had a much
shorter fatigue life than expected. de Havilland used a mixture of
state-of-the-art adhesives and riveting techniques to ensure that the fuselage
was flexible enough to remain intact through thousands of pressure and
temperature cycles. The flush-with-the-nose cockpit windows were controversial
on account of their poor downwards visibility, but in practice practice pilots
managed.
Nonetheless there were fears that BOAC and de Havilland and the British government were pushing
too hard. The Comet suffered two high-profile crashes in 1952 and 1953. The
first, in October 1952, took place during take-off from Rome's Ciampino
Airport. The pilot lifted the nose too quickly, causing the wings to act like
giant airbrakes. The airliner ran off the end of the runway and was wrecked,
albeit with no major injuries. The crash was blamed on the pilot, although
nowadays most sources cite hard-to-read avionics and immature operating
procedures. From the 1960s onwards the international aviation authorities
began to use a system of V-speeds to determine when a pilot should lift the
nose or abort take-off, but in 1952 pilots were expected to judge take-off by
the seat of their pants, which was untenable in the new age of large,
high-speed jet airliners.
The Comet's first fatal accident was in March 1953, during a night take-off
from Karachi. The aircraft had been purchased by Canadian Pacific Airlines and
was on a ferry flight. Again the airliner failed to take off, but this time it
hit a ditch and burst into flames, killing all eleven occupants. The pilot was
blamed for the accident, but in addition de Havilland took the opportunity to
modify the wing design to generate more lift during high angles of attack.
Worst still was a third crash two months later, during which a Comet broke up
a few minutes after take-off from Calcutta. Once again blame was heaped on the
pilot, who had apparently overstressed the wings while flying through severe
turbulence. In response to this accident de Havilland added a control damping
system to smooth out the control forces. One month later a fourth Comet, flown by Air France, was written
off after a hard landing at Dakar, although fortunately no-one was seriously
hurt.
A Douglas DC-6
There were fears in the press that the Comet was jinxed, but it has to be borne in mind that the Comet was not the only contemporary airliner to encounter problems shortly after entering service. In 1947 the brand-new Douglas DC-6 suffered a pair of in-flight fires caused by a poorly-designed fuel tank vent, one of which resulted in the deaths of all on board, and a year later another DC-6 crashed with all hands when the crew were incapacitated by the aircraft's fire extinguishers. A few years later the turboprop-powered Lockheed Electra also had a disastrous launch when two aircraft broke up in flight within the space of a few months, caused by harmonic flutter brought on by weak engine mounts.
But the Comet was supposed to be a fresh start, and things got worse. "Not since the great ship Titanic went down had the British people
felt such a stunning blow to their pride as masters of transport", wrote LIFE
in January 1954. Earlier in the month a BOAC Comet had crashed into the sea a few
minutes after an early-morning takeoff from Rome.
This time there was no turbulence. The aircraft, which had already logged a
million miles of trouble-free passenger service, had suddenly broken up in
flight, mid-way through an innocuous radio communication. It was baffling. The Comet was
grounded pending an investigation, during which the Royal Navy
undertook the painstaking task of raising the scattered wreckage from the sea
bed. The investigation tentatively suggested that engine failure might have
punctured the pressurised fuselage, so de Havilland took the opportunity to
reinforce and overhaul the Comet's airframe.
The Comet returned to service in March 1954, which seems unusually hasty from a modern perspective. The original investigation was still in progress, but the prevailing attitude was that the first few accidents had been the result of pilot error, and the in-flight
breakup had been a one-off. Furthermore air travel was just less safe in the 1950s than it is today. Between 27 July 1949, when the Comet's prototype first flew, and April 1954, when it was grounded for the second time, various models of the Lockheed Constellation were involved in no less than ten fatal accidents, killing hundreds.
Unfortunately just seventeen days after the aircraft re-entered service another Comet crashed into the sea. Again, the weather was
fine, and there were no indications from the pilot that anything was amiss, but something was obviously very wrong.
By that point two-thirds of the wreckage of the previous disaster had been assembled into a
framework of the doomed airliner. Examination of the recovered bodies revealed that many of the
passengers had been killed after sustaining blows to the head, which suggested they had been sucked upwards out of their seats and dashed into the
cabin ceiling.
A mixture of careful analysis of the wreckage and a
multi-thousand cycle pressurisation test in a special water tank finally
revealed the cause of the Comet's downfall. It wasn't the engines, or
sabotage, or even the passenger cabin windows. Instead a tear had opened up
alongside one of the ceiling-mounted navigation apertures. At altitude the tear had immediately ripped along the top of the fuselage, separating the nose from the
rest of the aircraft, causing the remaining airframe to rapidly disintegrate
due to the aerodynamic stresses. The passengers and crew had almost certainly died in less than a second.
On the positive side the enquiry had, finally, got to the bottom of the
Comet's problems, although there were still some loose ends. During development de
Havilland had subjected their test fuselage to a high-pressure proof test that
should, by rights, have ruptured the fuselage, but the airframe had survived
unscathed, and the earlier fatal crash at Calcutta, which had been blamed on turbulence, was never
reinvestigated. But the Comet was given a clean bill of health once more,
and although it went on to suffer several fatal accidents in years to come none of them were the result of a design flaw.
Unfortunately for de Havilland the crashes ruined the Comet's long-term prospects. From 1954 to 1958 the Comet sat idle while Boeing and Douglas of the United States designed their own jetliners, which entered service shortly thereafter. The original Comet 1 models were either scrapped as part of stress
testing or upgraded to Comet 2 standard, with a thicker fuselage and more
powerful engines. The Comet 2 itself was only ever operated by the RAF, as a
VIP transport and signals intelligence aircraft. The Comet 3 had more powerful
engines and distinctive wing-mounted fuel tanks, but only two examples were
ever constructed, as testbeds.
The ultimate commercial Comet was the Comet 4, which was produced in three
models. The standard Comet 4 had the Comet 3's wing-mounted tanks, with the
fuselage stretched to fit around 80 seats, almost twice as much as the
original. It had the range ot cross the Atlantic, although the flight still
required a refuelling stop at Gander. The 4B and 4C were stretched even more,
with and without wing-mounted tanks respectively.
On paper the Comet 4 was a worldbeater. It was the first airliner to offer
transatlantic passenger service, with service beginning in October 1958. But
just a few weeks later Pan-Am introduced the larger, longer-range Boeing 707
on the same route, carrying 174 passengers versus the Comet's 80. The Comet 4 sold to a surprisingly large number of airlines, mostly in
Africa, South America, and the Far East, although the orders tended to be for
one or two aircraft at a time. BOAC themselves only used the Comet for two
more years before replacing it with the Boeing 707. By that time the Douglas DC-8 had entered service, and between them the 707 and the DC-8 were the future, not the Comet.
Ultimately de Havilland made 114 Comets, of which 74 were Comet 4s, while
Boeing went on to sell over 1,000 707s and derivative models. de Havilland began work on a larger, longer-range Comet variant called the Comet 5, but nothing came of it, and in 1960 the company was bought by Hawker Siddeley. de Havilland's final airliner design
entered service in 1964 as the Hawker Siddeley Trident, coincidentally just a
few months after the delivery of the final Comet 4C. The Trident is covered
later in this series, but in brief it was a potentially excellent design that
was hobbled during development by an unusually short-sighted design brief. It has the unique distinction of being the only four-engined trijet.
The Comet had a curious twilight. The airlines that bought Comets in the
1950s and 1960s operated them for only a few years, replacing them with Boeing 737s and
Douglas DC-9s. In the mid-1960s the British budget airline Dan-Air decided to
build up a fleet of jets, and from 1966 onwards Dan-Air essentially bought
up every Comet 4 that entered the second-hand market, ending up with a fleet
of 49, making it by far the largest operator. Dan-Air specialised in
continental package tours, and I like to imagine that if the Comet had a soul,
it would have been faintly repulsed at having to shuttle holidaymakers to Spain rather than transporting captains of
industry to Johannesburg and Hong Kong.
Dan-Air's operation was fascinating. The airline purchased Comet 4s almost sight unseen, on the assumption that if the airframes were unsuitable
for passenger service they might be useful for spares. By removing some of the
toilets and reinforcing the floor the company managed to fit 3-2 seating, with
a total passenger load of 119. This compared well with an early Douglas DC-9
or Boeing 737, but the Comet was still uneconomical on account of having four
engines. However the purchase price of the aircraft was so cheap that Dan-Air still made a profit, and by swapping engines between aircraft Dan-Air managed to
avoid the high cost of mid-life servicing. The company continued to use the airliner until 1980, at which point it was the last commercial operator.
But the Comet still had life in it. During development de Havilland had
proposed a version of the airliner that would drop nuclear bombs. It had the wings of the Comet but a different fuselage, with a bomb bay and a fighter-style cockpit. The British government had plenty of bombers in the pipeline so the design went nowhere, but in the 1960s the RAF sought a new maritime patrol aircraft. Hawker-Siddeley proposed a militarised Comet, which was selected because the alternatives were either too big, or too small, or too foreign.
The
Hawker-Siddeley Nimrod, as it was called, was powered by Rolls-Royce Speys and
modified with a large munitions bay and a nose fairing that gave the aircraft a
square-jawed appearance. Beyond the first two prototypes the Nimrods were
new-build aircraft.
The Nimrod had
a bomb bay that could drop homing torpedos and nuclear depth charges. For
the Falklands War it was cleared to carry AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles in
hardpoints under the wings. There is another world, another universe, in which
the Nimrod ended its life hunting down Soviet TU-95s off the irradiated,
burning coast of Norfolk, but in our world the Nimrod and its derivatives ended
its service life in the 2010s, remaining in service long enough to participate
in the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi. During its life it was used for maritime patrol, signals intelligence, and eventually communications and battlefield surveillance.
The Nimrod was not without controversy. In the 1970s and early 1980s the
British government squandered over £1bn on a airborne-radar version of the
Nimrod, the AEW3, which was cancelled in 1986 with nothing to show for it. An
attempt to replace the original Nimrod with an upgraded, modernised successor
- the MRA4 - was supposed to enter service in 2003, but development dragged, and eventually the project was cancelled in 2010,
after the government had spent £3.4bn on the project. In both cases the key problems seem to
have been that the Comet was too small, and that the airframes had been built
in the days before robotic manufacture, which forced British Aerospace
and latterly BAE Systems to hand-fit modifications to individual aircraft.
Beyond the wasted money the decision to continually upgrade elderly aircraft
eventually cost lives. In 2006 a Nimrod caught fire and exploded in the skies
over Afghanistan, killing all fourteen on board. Over the years the Nimrods had undergone several rounds of poorly-documented, ad-hoc modifications, and the
problem was traced to an internal leak during mid-air refuelling that saturated some insulation with fuel, which then ignited after contact with a
hot air pipe. A similar but fortunately non-fatal incident a year later led to
the cessation of mid-air refuelling, after which the Nimrod left service in 2010, being
replaced by off-the-shelf designs from Boeing.
And that was the end of the Comet. One example remains in taxi-able condition. There are several in museums. There are no flying examples.
Sud Aviation (France)
Sud Aviation was a nationalised aviation business that was formed by a merger of several smaller companies in 1937. Technically it was
called SNCASE until 1957 - the French government has always loved acronyms - but I'm going
to call it Sud because that's easier to type. You have to pronounce "aviation" in a special way. Aye-vee-ASS-YON. Like that. You have to go real aggressive at the end there. Now you are French.
France's civil aviation industry still functioned during the Second World War.
The nation was in theory at peace. But production was mostly diverted to
support the German war effort, and the majority of French airliners and flying
boats of the 1940s ended up as unsuccessful prototypes. One exception was the
forty-seat Sud-Ouest Bretagne. The Bretagne was powered by a pair of
conventional piston engines, but later models had a pair of Turbomeca boost
jets as well, which improved takeoff performance in hot or high-altitude
conditions. One Bretagne was even equipped with Rolls Royce Nene engines as a
one-off testbed, although it didn't enter series production.
In 1951 the French government issued a specification for a new airliner that
would hopefully bring France into the jet age. Britain and France had slightly different post-war visions of what an airliner
should do, although they both realised that the United States would crush them if they didn't move fast. Britain wanted airliners that could service the remains of the
British Empire in Africa, Asia, and the Far East, and also cross the Atlantic
to reach New York, so Britain's post-war jetliners tended to be
moderate-to-large designs with long range. The original, short-range Comet 1 was
an exception, but it was thought of as an interim measure while de Havilland stretched and re-engined the design.
In contrast France wanted airliners that could cross France, and continental
Europe, and off to North Africa, but not necessarily much farther, so post-war
French airliners tended to be small-to-medium designs that prioritised
passenger load over range. The specification that led to the Sud Caravelle
asked for an aircraft that resembled the Comet, but with a slightly shorter
range of around 1,200 miles, and a slightly larger passenger load of around 50 people.
Sud responded with a proposal for a delta-winged jet aircraft, which mutated
into a twinjet with wing-mounted engines, then into a trijet with engines in
the rear, then finally a rear-engined twin-jet. In the process the aircraft
grew until it had a theoretical maximum passenger load of 80, although in
practice the actual amount tended to hover around 64.
The Caravelle's configuration, with two rear-mounted engines and a quasi T-tail, was unusual at the time, but it turned out to be very
influential. The Douglas DC-9 and BAC 1-11 owed a lot to it, as did the Boeing 727, in fact it essentially became the standard layout for short-range jetliners for the next twenty years. Mounting the engines in the tail kept them away from the
passenger cabin and runway debris, at the cost of having
to reinforce the wings to cope with upward bending forces in flight. To save time and money Sud licensed the Comet's nose
from de Havilland, although internally the Caravelle had three crewmembers
versus the Comet's four, dispensing with the navigator / radio operator. Some operators
even flew the Caravelle with just two flight crew, years before that
configuration became standard.
The Caravelle's prototype first flew in 1955. For the next four years Sud flew
the Caravelle on a trials basis, accumulating hours in a variety of different
conditions in case there were any unexpected gremlins. The fatigue issue that
downed the Comet was known by the time the Caravelle took flight, but Sud
nonetheless subjected their prototype to the same water tank testing as the
Comet just in case. Sud also used the flight tests as a way of showing the Caravelle off to
foreign buyers, which was in practice very effective.
The Caravelle eventually entered service in 1959, with Air France, but it quickly generated sales to other airlines, including SAS, Alitalia, Finnair, and
Sabena. There was a notable sale in 1961 to United Airlines of the United
States, who ended up buying twenty Caravelles, making them the first US
airline to fly European jets. At the time the Caravelle was unique as the only
short-haul jetliner, which made it particularly appealing to United, who used
it on first-class flights from New York to Chicago and back. Their version had upgraded engines and enlarged cockpit side windows, which became standard for
later Caravelles.
The UA sale was Sud's high water mark in the United States. In 1961 the
company
signed a deal with Douglas whereby Douglas would market the aircraft in the US and potentially
licence-build any sales they achieved. The next year TWA signed a deal to
purchase twenty Caravelles, but they quickly backed out, and the Sud-Douglas
deal expired. A year later Douglas announced their own short-range,
rear-engined airliner, the DC-9, which led to grumbles from Sud that Douglas
had just been using the Caravelle to test the waters for its new design.
Nonetheless the Caravelle continued to sell internationally. As with the Comet
it racked up a small number of sales to a large number of airlines,
but Sud was more willing to tailor the aircraft to an airline's specific need,
and so there was a bewildering number of variants. The Caravelle 11R of 1967,
for example, had a mixed passenger-cargo load for use by African airlines,
while the final model, the Caravelle 12 of 1971, was stretched and re-engined to accommodate
140 passengers over a shorter range than earlier models, making it almost an
ancestor of the Dassault Mercure. One of its major customers was even
Air Inter, who flew it alongside the Mercure.
Ultimately Sud sold 280 Caravelles, beating the Comet more than two-to-one. But
it was still a generation one aircraft, saddled with relatively inefficient
engines. By the 1980s it had been displaced by the Douglas DC-9 and Boeing
737, which could carry more people over a greater distance for less money. Air
Inter ended service of their Caravelle 12s in 1991. The very last operator was
Gabon Express, who continued to fly their two Caravelles until a fatal crash
in 2004 led to the closure of the airline.
Sud Aviation itself was absorbed into Aérospatiale in 1970. On paper the
Caravelle's successor was the Sud Super-Caravelle, but apart from the name and
the basic idea of short-haul travel the Super-Caravelle had nothing to do with
the Caravelle itself; the design eventually evolved into Concorde.
The Caravelle has gone on to become something of a forgotten pioneer. Of the
first three jetliners - the Comet, the Tupolev Tu-104, and the Caravelle - it
was the only unqualified success, which unfortunately means that it has a
relatively undramatic story. An early crash in 1963 was blamed on the use of
flammable hydraulic fluids, later accidents were the result of engine and
landing gear failures, but for the most part the Caravelle was no more
accident-prone than any other airliner of the period.
As a short-to-medium-haul jetliner it set no records, and beyond the general
configuration its design was conservative, although as with the Boeing 727 it
had unusual rear-mounted airstairs. It was however very attractive. The
rear-engined configuration is fading into history nowadays, but for a while it
was extremely common, and yet most of the rear-mounted airliners had a
utilitarian look. The Caravelle, with its elongated fuselage and streamlined
nosecone, had an elegance about it.
No, tell a lie. It did set one record. During flight testing Air France took
one of their Caravelles to an altitude of 40,000 over Paris and cut the engine
power, at which point it managed to glide all the way to Dijon, 150 miles to
the south-east. The flight took forty-six minutes and was presumably very
quiet. Did I mention that the Caravelle had triangular windows? Sud reasoned that passengers wanted to look out and down, not up, so they made the windows wider at the bottom, which reduced the amount of metal they had to cut from the fuselage.
And that's de Havilland and Sud. In the next article, Embraer! And then Fokker, and that weird German airliner that had the engines over the wings.
