32. The British Airplane Manufacturer That Threatened to Supplant Boeing
Today, Airbus is threatening to eclipse Boeing. However, until the recent 737 Max fiasco, things had been going great for the giant American airplane manufacturer for as long as anybody could remember. For the bulk of the commercial travel era, Boeing was the dominant player in passenger planes. However, there was a time in the early 1950s when reasonable people could have predicted that the future of passenger planes belonged to Britain’s de Havilland, with Boeing a distant second.
The reason was the de Havilland Comet, history’s first commercial jet liner. Its prototype first flew in 1949, then Comets hit the market in 1952. Fast and sleek, with a pressurized cabin that was comfortable, relatively quiet, and featured large square windows, the Comet cut six hours of travel time between London and New York. It was the world’s most promising passenger plane – then a seemingly minor design oversight turned out to be a major mistake, and doomed the pioneering jetliner.
