Brabazon Committee - Success and Failure

Success and Failure

Of the six Brabazon Report derived designs that were produced, only two could be considered outright successes. Two others were victims of circumstance and arguably should have been more successful. The remaining two were simply doomed to failure.

The Type I was certainly doomed from the start. The design was tailored to BOAC's perceived needs, which in retrospect seem very odd and were certainly not shared by other airlines. They believed that the passengers of the aircraft would be the particularly well-off or government employees, as they were the only ones able to afford air travel at the time. This led to a large amount of space per passenger in consideration of the long journey duration, which kept its operating costs high and made it too expensive to operate. It appears they failed to consider the side-effects of greatly increasing route capacity through the introduction of these designs, and the idea of a large number of passengers in the same airframe does not appear to have been considered. Only a single Brabazon prototype was built and flown before it was broken up along with the uncompleted second prototype.

The Type II was the only outright success of the series. The smaller design for the original short-haul need was eventually filled by the Dove with great success, leading to a production run in the hundreds. At the other end of the scale, the Viscount is arguably one of the most successful airliners of its class, and was also produced into the hundreds. Other entrants did not fare so well, including the Ambassador and the Handley Page Marathon, which were forced to compete against the "risky" turboprop design that completely outperformed them. Handley Page responded in the mid-1950s with the Dart Herald, competing with some success as a sort of larger Viscount.

By all rights the Type III should have been a success, but a series of delays before and after entering service forced it to compete with newly-introduced jet designs from the US, with which it could simply not compare. The Britannia proved to be an excellent design with a long service life, but only in niche roles.

The Type IV Comet almost became an outstanding success, but three unexplained crashes grounded them and the design changes required delayed reintroduction for long enough that the US was able to catch up with the Boeing 707.

By the 1960s it was clear that the UK had lost the airliner market to the US, and later designs like the BAC 1-11, Vickers VC-10, and Hawker Siddeley Trident although successful would be unable to win a substantial part of it back again. Another committee was formed to consider supersonic designs, STAC, and worked with Bristol to create the Bristol 223 design for a 100-passenger transatlantic airliner. However this was going to be so expensive to produce that the effort was later merged with similar efforts in France to create the Concorde.