Every Jetliner Ever Made: British Aerospace and Comac

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made, in alphabetical order, with Airbus and Boeing at the end, otherwise this series of articles would be incredibly top-heavy, just like internet glamour legend Diamond Jackson, but with aeroplanes. This week we're going to look at British Aerospace, from the United Kingdom, and Comac, from China.

Or is it COMAC? I think it's COMAC. This is going to be short, because British Aerospace only made one airliner, and COMAC's history is not yet written. I could have padded it out by putting Convair at the end, but then it would have been too long. I begin.

A Convair 880, which appears in the next post.

BRITISH AEROSPACE / BAe (Great Britain)

The component parts of British Aerospace developed several jetliners, and British Aerospace's predecessor, BAC, developed several more, but there was only one jetliner with British Aerospace branding, and it was the 146 regional jet of the 1980s.

Throughout the 20th Century all of Britain's big manufacturing industries faced more or less the same basic problem. Whether it was the car industry, the film industry, steel, aeroplanes, nuclear power, space rockets, music, canned meat, beer, comics, music etc. Britain is an awkward size. The country is big enough and rich enough to make things, but not big or rich enough to sustain a large domestic market, and not rich or powerful enough to force the rest of the world to bend to its will. There was a time when politicians in foreign lands begged us not to put tariffs on their goods. By the 1980s no-one cared.

HMS Warspite, blowing things up

British used to be powerful enough to bend the rest of the world to its will. But a combination of the rise of Japan as a naval force, the enormous debts accrued by two massive wars, the subsequent rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as global superpowers, and the fact that post-war colonialism was not a good look, none of those things helped. Now we can merely ask that the world bends to our will, in exchange for the chance to sit next to David Beckham at Wimbledon or perhaps a knighthood. We can't use force any more, at least not without asking the United States if we could borrow some of their transport aircraft, at which point the United States would probably say "knock it off".

In the post-war years it became apparent that the costs involved in developing jet engines, guided missiles, computerised flight control systems, nuclear weapon systems, space rockets etc was an order of magnitude higher than the costs involved in developing fabric-and-metal monoplanes, and so the UK government asked Vickers, Bristol, Avro, and Hunting to merge with each other so that Britain's aviation industry would be big and strong. This entity became the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC).

The BAC 1-11 jetliner was a modest hit, the BAC/Vickers VC-10 and the BAC Concorde less so, although they were fantastic aircraft. Meanwhile Hawker Siddeley, who had resisted being merged into BAC, had its own successes and failures with the Hawker 748 regional turboprop and the Trident jetliner. In 1977 the UK government merged Hawker and BAC to form British Aerospace, presumably in the hope that this new entity would be even bigger and stronger than BAC and Hawker separately, although there was also an element of political dogmatism about the merger.

British Aerospace existed from 1977 until 1999, at which point it bought Marconi and became BAE Systems, which still exists today and is in rude health, but during its 22-year life British Aerospace only produced one airliner, the BAe 146. Development began in the early 1970s, in fits and starts, under Hawker Siddeley, but the prototype didn't make its first flight until 1981.

In the early 1970s the idea of a jet-powered regional airliner was cutting-edge, although Hawker-Siddeley called it a "feederliner" rather than a regional jet. The short-range market was at the time dominated by turboprops, and a few holdovers from the piston age, but passengers consistently preferred jets, which were faster and could fly higher.

The HS 146, as it was originally called, had more or less the same specification as later regional jets from Bombardier and Embraer - a passenger capacity of around eighty people, with a range of around two thousand miles - but with high-mounted wings and a T-tail, all chosen to enable the 146 to use poor-quality runways. And unusually it had four engines rather than two, which was a consequence of its genesis in the early 1970s. The design emerged just as Lycoming of the United States was putting the finishing touches on the ALF 502, an innovative turbofan engine fitted with a gearbox that kept the fan spinning at subsonic speeds, which greatly reduced engine noise. Hawker decided to build the 146 around Lycoming's new engine.

The 502 had about a third more power than the nearest competitor, the Garrett TFE731, but it still only had around 7000lb of thrust, which was two-thirds to a half that of the engines that powered small, full-sized jetliners. As a consequence Hawker needed to fit the 146 with four engines to ensure a safe margin in case of engine failure.

The choice of four engines was controversial, but it gave the 146 good acceleration, a power reserve in case of engine failure, quiet operation, and a short takeoff run. With a run of around 3,000 feet the 146 needed less than half the runway length of a Boeing 737. By coincidence this made it an ideal fit for London City Airport, which opened in 1988, a few years after the 146 entered service, and it quickly became a common sight at that airport.

Nonetheless the aircraft ended up as a niche product, selling in small quantities to a variety of operators rather than having large orders. With four engines its fuel consumption was on a par with a small, twin-engined jetliner, and the introduction of the short-field Airbus A318 in the early 1990s eliminated some of its raison d'etre. The A318 could also take off from London City Airport, and had a larger cabin and a longer range.

Throughout its life sales were modest, but steady, with the 146 winning orders from regional airlines in Australia, Europe, and the United States. It was also selected by the Royal Air Force as a freighter, where its performance later proved useful in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, and as a VIP transport, where it was used as part of the Queen's flight. Quite infamously Prince Charles - as he was then - overran the runway while landing in the Inner Hebrides in 1994, apparently after asking the Captain if he could have a turn at the controls. No-one was seriously injured but it was a major source of embarrassment for all concerned. In 2017 a late-model 146 flew from Cape Town in South Africa to St Helena in the Atlantic Ocean to pick up a bunch of passengers who had been stranded when their ship broke down, in the process becoming the first commercial jet flight from Africa to the island.

British Aerospace stretched the 146 twice, with the 146-200 and -300 increasing passenger load to roughly one hundred and one hundred and ten passengers respectively, with range dropping from two thousand miles to around eighteen hundred. Depending on the route the aircraft was often flown with a reduced passenger load or less fuel, or both. Initial production of the BAe 146 wound down in the 1990s, at which point it was then sold, in modified form, as the Avro RJ. The RJ75, RJ85, and RJ100 were similar to the 146-100, 146-200, and 146-300, but with more fuel-efficient engines and improved interiors. Despite the completely new name they were essentially the same aircraft, and that particular version of Avro was really just a subsidiary of BAe based in Manchester. The general internet consensus is that it was an attempt to fool buyers in the United States that the 146 was an American aircraft, or at least Canadian.

Ultimately BAe and its Avro subsidiary sold almost four hundred 146s, making it the most popular British jetliner of all time. As of 2024 the 146 is slowly leaving passenger service, although it remains a popular cargo aircraft and fire-bomber on account of its short take-off run and unusually high engine power.

COMAC (China)

The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China was founded in 2008 as part of a government initiative to kickstart the domestic airline industry. In the 1970s the Chinese civil aviation authority developed a clone of the Boeing 707, the Shanghai Y-10, but although the resulting aircraft made a series of publicity flights it never entered series production, because the underlying design was twenty years old. China's state airline instead bought a mixture of Russian, British, and eventually US and European designs, and as of this writing Air China has a mixed fleet of Boeing and Airbus airliners.

A COMAC ARJ21, original by N509FZ

But the Chinese government decided that long-term reliance on foreign suppliers was a bad idea, and so COMAC was formed in the early 2000s. Its first product was the ARJ21, which was launched in 2008 and is still in production. It has the classic configuration of a regional jet, with twin rear-mounted engines - US-designed General Electric CF34 turbofans - and a T-tail. The configuration is very similar to the Douglas DC-9, and indeed COMAC had in the past signed a deal to licence-produce DC-9s, but the ARJ21 has wings developed by Antonov of Ukraine and a new nosecone.

It carries a passenger load of 80-100 people, with a range of 1,400 miles. Since 2008 COMAC has only managed to sell just over 100 units, all within China, not helped by a general decline in the regional jet market.

Does it sound as though I'm rushing? There are only around a hundred ARJ21s, and they only fly within China, and I have to admit that I've never seen one or been in one. The general industry trend has been away from smaller jetliners to larger, more flexible designs - but not too large, as Airbus discovered with the A380 - so in the early 2010s COMAC expanded their range with the C919.

A COMAC C919, original by N509FZ

The C919 is conceptually similar to Russia's Sukhoi MC-21, in the sense that it's an attempt to make a domestic analogue of the hugely popular Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. The C919 is however smaller than those two airliners, with a passenger load of 150-190 and a much shorter range of only 2,500 miles, although an extended-range, 3,500 mile model has been mooted. Tibet Airlines has ordered a special variant with a shortened fuselage and reinforced landing gear, optimised for high-altitude runways.

As of 2024 ten airframes are in operation with airlines in China, although there are apparently over a thousand orders on the books. General internet consensus has it that the design lags behind modern versions of the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, but only by a single generation. There is an implication that the C919's successor will be directly competitive with Western designs, and it will be interesting to see how it does on the international market.

And that's British Aerospace and COMAC. Next, Convair and Dassault. Or Concorde. Or Concorde and Convair. I don't know yet.

Every Jetliner Ever Made: Antonov and BAC

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order. In this instalment I'm going to cover Antonov and BAC.

It would have been so easy to skip over the Soviet-era aircraft manufacturers. Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev and so on. How can I judge whether their designs were any good? What were they like? Were they competitive with Western designs?

Kyiv, 1938

And perhaps the biggest question, what did they mean? An airliner isn't just a collection of statistics, it also has meaning. The Boeing 747 means something. It's the Queen of the Skies, the star of Airport 1975, full-on 1970s golden age luxury top deck Pan Am disco-era cocaine-guzzling naff glamour. Concorde also means something. It's the airliner of mid-80s yuppies and captains of British industry. It's the airliner of Sam Fox wearing a swimsuit backwards so that you can see her chest. Even the anonymous Airbus A320 means something, because it's the aeroplane Daniella Westbrook uses to fly to Spain or wherever it is she goes. Airliners are like cars. They have meaning beyond their functionality.

But what does the Ilyushin Il-86 mean? If you're a keen aviation fan the Il-86 is a physical representation of the Soviet Union's stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It was launched in 1981, but it had the fuselage of a 1970s widebody and engines from the 1960s. It was out of date, behind the times. For you and I, however, the Il-86 is just a number and some letters. It would have been easy to skip the Soviet airliners. Easy, and weak. Margaret Thatcher would not have approved, and I will not fail her.

An Antonov AN-2 biplane, which remained in production from 1947 to 2001

ANTONOV (Ukraine)

Antonov was founded in the late 1940s as a vehicle for the designs of Oleg Antonov, who cut his teeth during the Great Patriotic War designing aircraft for the Yakovlev bureau. Technically Antonov's company was called OKB-153, and as per standard Soviet practice it was more a design bureau than a fully-integrated design-and-manufacture organisation, but let's call it Antonov. The company's first product... the organisation's first design was the AN-2 biplane, pictured above, an incredibly useful utility plane that remained in production right up until the early 2000s.

The AN-2 was followed by a series of turboprop transport aircraft that were constructed in great numbers for various Warsaw Pact air forces, all of which are no doubt fascinating but are outside the scope of this series.

Nowadays the company is famous in the west for the An-124 Ruslan and An-225 Mirya cargo aircraft, which were produced in tiny numbers, just two in the case of the An-225. In theory they could be configured as passenger airliners - the An-124 even had a dedicated passenger deck, much like the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy - but in practice they never were. Instead the An-124's passenger deck was designed to carry ancillary staff, such as load handlers or engineers.

The smaller An-72 short-take-off cargo transport could also be configured as a passenger aircraft, but I can't find any evidence that it was ever used as such, at least not for very long. The An-72 (and its stretched variant, the An-74) did however lead to Antonov's one and only jetliner.

Antonov AN-72

The An-72 had a peculiar configuration, with two engines mounted above the wing. This had the benefit of keeping the engines away from runway debris, and it also meant that the flow of engine exhaust passing over the wing generated extra lift. In the 1990s Antonov decided to turn the An-72 into a passenger airliner, aimed at the regional market. The result was eventually launched in 2004 as the Antonov An-148, although it was initially called the An-74TK300. Why An-148? Because it was twice as good as the An-74, probably.

Antonov An-148

The chief modifications were the wing and engines. For the An-148 Antonov streamlined the wing so that it performed better during the cruise portion of flight, and mounted the engines in conventional under-wing pods, where they were a lot easier to service. The resulting aircraft had the classic configuration of a regional jet, with a stubby fuselage, a T-tail, and a vaguely hunchbacked appearance. Not a million miles from the BAe 146, but with two engines. Passenger load varied from around 60-80 people, depending on configuration, with a range of anything from 1,300 - 2,700 miles depending on model. A stretched version, the An-158, had seating for almost 100 passengers. On the whole the An-148 / 158 was larger and longer-legged than most regional jets, but not large enough to compete with something like a Boeing 737.

Commercial operations began with airlines in Ukraine and Russia in 2009. There were at one time over 150 orders, but in practice total production amounted to only 47 aircraft, including six An-158s, which were all used by the Cuban state airline Cubana. The remainder were bought by various airlines and government ministries in Russia and Ukraine, with two going to North Korea's state airline Air Koryo. Sales were not helped by Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and were dealt a death blow by the subsequent general invasion, with several operators citing the difficulty of sourcing spare parts.

I'm not qualified to talk about the economic issues affecting the Eastern European aviation industry in the post-Soviet era, but I have the impression that the An-148 suffered from entering production at a time when regional jets were starting to fall out of fashion, and also for its odd configuration, which was twice as large as most other regional jets but not large enough to replace a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. The contemporary Bombardier CRJ-1000 had roughly the same problem. If it had been launched twenty years earlier it might have captured the same market as the BAe 146, which it closely resembled in terms of size and range if not engine count, but by the mid-2000s the market was instead shifting to full-sized airliners that could be used on a wider range of routes.

As of this writing the aircraft theoretically remains in production, but the last airframes were delivered in 2018.

BAC (Great Britain)

The British Aircraft Corporation was formed in 1960 from the government-led merger of English Electric, Vickers, Bristol, and Hunting, all of which are much easier to spell than Hawker-Siddeley. Before the merger Hunting had designed a small jet airliner that could target the same market as the classic piston-engined Douglas DC-3, with thirty seats and a modest range. After the merger BAC decided to expand the specification, which in retrospect was a smart idea, because this series of articles is full of jet airliners that were too small to make economic sense.

BAC 1-11 in service with American Airlines

The resulting airliner was the BAC 1-11, usually referred to as the One-Eleven, which was an internal product code and should not be confused with the Lockheed L-1011, a completely different aircraft.

The 1-11 had two engines mounted either side of the rear fuselage, a wing mounted towards the rear of the aircraft, and a T-tail, with a high-mounted tailplane. The configuration was unusual at the time, shared only with the Sud Aviation Caravelle, but within a few years it became much more popular, albeit not because of the BAC 1-11.

The 1-11 was powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Spey engines, which were powerful, but also noisy and very thirsty, something that increasingly became problematic as fuel prices rose and noise regulations tightened in the 1970s. The configuration kept the engines away from the passenger compartment and above the wake of the wings, and by mounting them above the ground the hope was that they wouldn't suck up debris from the runway.

The 1-11's configuration had been pioneered by the Sud Aviation Caravelle, pictured here, which was one of the very first jetliners, entering service in 1959

The engine location necessitated a high-mounted tailplane, which indirectly led to the crash of the 1-11's prototype in 1963. Although the tailplane was out of the wash of turbulent air from the wings in level flight, it was caught in the wake of the wings during high angles of attack, such as when the aircraft was coming in to land. Without control authority from the tail there was no way to push the nose of the 1-11 back down, which resulted in the prototype belly-flopping into the ground with the loss of all on board. This problem became known as a "deep stall", and it was a major problem with T-tail warplanes, notably the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. Ultimately the problem was solved with a mixture of aerodynamic tweaks and a simple fly-by-wire system that used hydraulic power to push the nose of the aircraft down.

The 1-11 entered passenger service in 1965, initially with British United Airways, but in something of a coup it also entered service with Braniff of the United States, who had ordered a clutch of 1-11s in 1961, when the aircraft was still in development.

The initial model carried 89 passengers over a range of 750 miles; later models increased the load to 119 passengers and over twice the range. The post-war British aviation industry produced a number of designs that were compromised in one way or the other by technical peculiarities or odd configurations, but the 1-11 was by all accounts a simple, well-designed airliner with no quirks. About the only technical issue it faced was its awkward size, slightly too large for the regional market but not large enough to be a coast-to-coast people carrier.

At the time the US aviation industry had nothing comparable. As mentioned elsewhere the US lagged behind Europe in the post-war years. Europe was forced to rebuild its aviation industry from scratch, so Britain, France, and Germany jumped directly from piston airliners to turboprops and jet engines, while Douglas and Lockheed in the United States continued with piston designs, because why not? Jets were uncharted territory and piston airliners were a proven technology. In this environment the BAC 1-11 purchase by Braniff was a shock in US aviation circles at the time. To make things worse American Airlines went on to place an order for thirteen 1-11s in 1963.

Unfortunately the 1-11 was both blessed and cursed by its timing. On the positive side, and unlike the Avro Jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, and to a lesser extent the Sud-Aviation Caravelle, it was released at a time when airlines had got over their initial skepticism of jet engines. And beyond the crash of its prototype the 1-11 had none of the design problems that affected first-generation jetliners, although two fatal crashes in 1966 (due to turbulence) and 1967 (a faulty auxiliary power unit pump) must have given airlines pause.

But on the negative side the crash of the prototype delayed the 1-11's entry to service until 1965, by which time Boeing had began test flights of its three-engined Boeing 727, while Douglas had announced that it was working on a new jetliner, the DC-9. The 727 ended up appealing to a slightly different market - it was larger - but the DC-9 competed directly with the 1-11. It had more powerful engines and greater range than the 1-11, and on announcement in 1963 it immediately began winning orders. Those orders might have led nowhere, but Douglas really committed itself to jet power, and the DC-9 entered service on schedule in late 1965, only a few months after the 1-11.

A Douglas DC-9 in US military service

BAC eventually sold almost 250 1-11s, including nine that were licence-built in Romania during the 1980s. This made it one of the most popular British jetliners, but once Douglas and Boeing entered the jetliner market the orders tailed off. At the time of its launch the One-Eleven's only real US competitor was the four-engined Boeing 720, which was much larger, but as mentioned it struggled to compete with the DC-9. Two years later Boeing launched the 737, which also had more power and range, and at that point sales of the 1-11 dried up. There was a general feeling that the DC-9 and 737 could be stretched to meet future demand, while the 1-11 was at the end of its development cycle.

The 1-11's prospects were not helped by the conceptually similar but slightly smaller Fokker F28 Fellowship, which was launched a few years later and attracted almost as many orders. UK production continued at a very low rate until as late as 1984. BAC proposed a number of enlarged successors, including the 2-11 and 3-11, but the two programmes were abandoned so as not to compete with what would eventually become the Airbus A300.

In the UK the 1-11 was particularly valued by low-cost package tour airlines, such as Dan-Air and the nascent Ryanair, who found them perfect for Spanish package holidays. Dan-Air infamously fitted their 1-11s with seat-back catering, whereby packed lunches were locked into a pair of compartments in the back of each seat. The idea was that passengers outbound to Spain would be given a key for the top compartment, and those coming back on the return flight would be given a key for the bottom compartment, which by that time was probably pretty whiffy.

The 1-11 slowly left service in the 1990s, largely because its Spey engines were too noisy for modern regulations and guzzled too much fuel. BAC eventually merged with Hawker to form British Aerospace, which continues today as BAE Systems. In 2010 the 1-11's type certificate was revoked in the EU on account of its excessive noise, and as of 2024 none remain in the air.

And that's Antonov and BAC. Next, Bombardier. And then Convair, who released two airliners that were absolutely superb at transforming aviation fuel into smoke and noise. And Dassault, whose only airliner was a heck of a thing.

Every Jetliner Ever Made: Avro Canada

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.

A Lockheed C-5 Galaxy in formation with a C-141 Starlifter. The C-5 Galaxy is not a jetliner. It will not be featured in this series of posts.

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.

A C-5 Galaxy landing at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in 1990, a rare example of rough field operations.

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.

An Avro Jetliner, courtesy the National Library of Canada

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.

An English Electric Canberra, powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Avons. Loaded with bombs it had roughly the same range and speed as the Jetliner, despite possessing only two engines. Courtesy the National Archives of Norway.

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?