De Havilland Comet - Legacy

Legacy

The Comet is widely regarded jointly as an adventurous step forward and a supreme tragedy; nevertheless, the aircraft's legacy does include numerous advances in aircraft design and in accident investigations. The inquiries into the accidents that plagued the Comet 1 were perhaps some of the most extensive and revolutionary that have ever taken place, establishing precedents in accident investigation; many of the deep-sea salvage and aircraft reconstruction techniques employed have remained in use within the aviation industry. In spite of the Comet being subjected to what was then the most rigorous testing of any contemporary airliner, pressurisation and the dynamic stresses involved were not thoroughly understood at the time of the aircraft's development, nor was the concept of metal fatigue. While these lessons could be implemented on the drawing board for future aircraft, corrections could be only retroactively applied to the Comet.

According to de Havilland's chief test pilot John Cunningham, who had flown the prototype's first flight, representatives from American manufacturers such as Boeing and Douglas privately disclosed that if de Havilland had not experienced the Comet's pressurisation problems first, it would have happened to them. Cunningham likened the Comet to the later Concorde, and added that he had assumed that the aircraft would change aviation, which it subsequently did. Aviation author Bill Withun concluded that the Comet had pushed "'the state-of-the-art' beyond its limits."

"I don't think it is too much to say that the world changed from the moment the Comet's wheels left the ground."

Aeronautical engineering firms were quick to respond to the Comet's commercial advantages and technical flaws alike; other aircraft manufacturers learned from, and profited by, the hard-earned lessons embodied by de Havilland's Comet. While the Comet's buried engines were used on some other early jet airliners, such as the Tupolev Tu-104, later aircraft, such as the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, would differ by employing podded engines held on pylons beneath the wings. Boeing stated that podded engines were selected for their passenger airliners because buried engines carried a higher risk of catastrophic wing failure in the event of engine fire. In response to the Comet tragedies, manufacturers also developed various means of pressurisation testing, often going so far as to explore rapid depressurisation; subsequent fuselage skins were of a greater thickness than the skin of the Comet.