Handley Page H.P.42 - Operational History

Operational History

The first flight was on 14 November 1930, by G-AAGX later to be named Hannibal, with Squadron Leader Thomas Harold England at the controls. The certificate of airworthiness was granted in May 1931, permitting commercial service; the first flight with fare-paying passengers was to Paris on 11 June of that year.

Imperial Airways wanted its airliners to land safely at low speed, which meant a large wing area (almost as much as a 767 that weighs more than 10 times as much). In 1951 Peter Masefield wrote, "The trouble about a slow aeroplane with a really low wing loading is the way it insists on wallowing about in turbulent air ... One of the reasons that seven times as many people fly to Paris to-day, compared with 1931, is that the incidence of airsickness in modern aircraft is only one-hundredth of that in the pre-War types." Another writer remembered "I had quite often been landed in a '42' at Lympne to take on sufficient fuel to complete the flight (from Paris) to London against a headwind — 90 mph was its normal cruising speed."

When the H.P.42s were finally withdrawn from civil service on 1 September 1939 they had recorded almost a decade without any major accidents.