The De Haviland Comet was the first operational jet airliner. It began regular service in
May of 1956.
Its initial success was tarnished by a series of crashes that were ultimately attributed
to metal fatigue and a fuselage design that allowed small cracks to quickly propagate and
cause massive failure of the airframe.
After the cause of the crashes was determined, De Haviland redsigned and lengthened the
original Comet to produce the Comet 4. By that time, however, the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8
were in service, and the smaller capacity and lower speed of the Comet were not competitive.
The elegant, streamlined nose section of the Comet did live on in the French Carvelle airliner.
These photographs were taken on April 12, 1997 at the Museum of Flight's
Resoration Center at Paine Field in Everrett, WA.
All Photographs © 1997
Geoff Sobering,
Non-commercial Use Allowed with Attribution,
All Other Rights Reserved
A note about the photographs: clicking on the thumbnail picture will load an image approximately
500x300 pixels large (~60Kb). Under each thumbnail is the word "huge". Clicking
there will load the original scanned image of about 1000x600 pixels at JPEG 75% quality
(~400-500Kb).
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