I invite you to watch as the sleek
midnight blue and white aircraft designated “Yoke Victor” slowly
begins its takeoff roll down runway 19L. The four de
Havilland Ghost turbojet engines cradled close inboard within
the wings roared as they produce 200,000 pounds of thrust. At 112
knots Captain Maurice Haddon imperceptibly
pulled back on the control column and 100,000 pounds of
aluminum alloy, wires, rubber tubing, ambitions and 43 souls floated
off the asphalt.
It is 4:39 pm on the sweltering hot Saturday, of 2
May, 1953. Thunderheads are feasting on the heavy air above
Calcutta, like false promises of Indra the King of Heaven. As the
twin bogie wheels of “Yoke Victor” fold neatly into the underbelly, the crew and passengers of Flight 783
have less than six minutes to live.
Over the previous decade the sun had
begun setting on the British Empire. India and Palestine were
already free. Egypt was straining at the leash, as were South Africa,
Indonesia, Malaysia and
Singapore. Designed over that same time span, the world's first
passenger jet, the De Haviland designed and built Comet (above), was a bold technical gamble
which, if won, would give Britain a five year advantage in aviation.
The
Comet cruised at twice the speed of its piston engine competition,
the American built DC – 4, cutting travel time between London and
Singapore or South Africa by two days. For example, Yoke Victor, the
8th
Comet assembled, had begun this day in Singapore, passing 1650 hours
of safe flight since leaving the De Haviland factory three years
earlier.
On the flight to Calcutta the pressurized cabin
provided shirt sleeve comfort while flying 9 miles above the weather
in -55°C. air.
Hydraulics amplified the pilot's muscles to compensate for the 80%
reduction of air pressure. The jet engines burned cheap kerosene and
were more reliable, making even a half empty Comet profitable for the
operator, British Overseas Airways Corporation.
Four
minutes after taking off, as Yoke Victor climbed northwestward over
the dry West Bengal plains, Radio Officer Alfred Wood notified their next
stop at Delhi they expected to cover the 800 miles in two hours and
19 minutes. He then added, “Climbing to 32,000 feet.” Two
minutes later Delhi informed Yoke Victor of the local barometric
pressure, so the crew of the Comet could fine tune their altimeter.
There was no response.
Twenty-five
miles north northwest of Calcutta, in the rice paddies and jute
fields outside the village of Jagalgori, field workers were suddenly
pummeled by a 60 mile per hour gust of wind. Then they
heard
a distant explosion and saw a flash of light. Looking up they
witnessed an airplane on fire, saw it split in two, and watched in
horror as the pieces fell to the ground all around them. Many ran to
the flaming wreckage but it was quickly evident there was no one to
be helped. Twenty minutes later a constable telegraphed the police
in Calcutta, “Plane knocked down by tempest.” Like all first
reports, it was wrong.
There
was no radar track of the flight of Yoke Victor, and no data or
cockpit voice recorder. Investigators could only study the 5 mile
long path of debris. It lay generally along the aircraft's heading
of 334 degrees. The scattering indicated the plane had broken up at
high altitude.
At the southern end of the debris field were the port
outer elevator with port top skin of Yoke Victor, then the starboard
outer elevator with sections of the starboard bottom skin. The
tubular cabin structure had landed, upside down in two pieces - nose
to half way down the tube at frame 27, and the aft center section,
including the stub of the wings encasing the engines, to the
pressure bulkhead at the rear of the fuselage (above) - all of which landed
in a dry river bed and in the branches of a large tree.
Calcutta Crash
Because
of the paucity of evidence, the Indian court of inquiry issued their
report a mere three weeks later. BOAC flight 783 had crashed they
said, because of either “Sever gusts encountered in the thunder
squall...” or, because of unease about the new hydraulic control system, “Over controlling or loss of control by the
pilot...” Making their own assessment of the jigsaw puzzle of
parts, De Haviland agreed with the Indian court. Yoke Victor had
been destroyed in mid-flight by either an “act of God”, or pilot
error. It was recommended that in the presence of turbulence the
speedy jets be slowed down. But no one questioned keeping the Comet in the air.
Seven
months later, on Sunday 10 January, 1954, another Comet rolled down a
runway, this time at Rome's Ciampino airfield. On it's tail was
prominently displayed it's International Aircraft identification:,
G-ALYP; “G” for Great Britain, “A” indicating a heavier then
aircraft, “L” for the 12th
pass through the 26 letters in the alphabet, “Y” for a De
Haviland Comet and “P” for the Comet hull number 60003 – the
third Comet constructed and the first to be released into service
with BOAC.
Yoke
Peter first flew on 9 January, 1952. After test flights it was turned
over to BOAC for 39 hours of training flights. Then, on 2 May, 1952,
Yoke Peter became the first Comet to enter scheduled service, with a
21 hour flight from London via 5 stops to Johannesburg, South Africa.
In its first year the 8 Comets in the BOAC fleet flew 12 million
miles, carrying 30,000 of the wealthy and privileged, 35 at a time.
The
plane had begun the day in Singapore, and was labeled BOAC Flight 783
– the last two digits an odd number because the course was to be
westbound - with stops in Bangkok, Calcutta, Karachi, Bahrain and
Beirut, before arriving in Rome. On the ground at Ciampino airfield,
the passengers were off loaded while Yoke Peter was refueled.
BOAC
maintenance chief, Gerard “Gerry” Arthur Bull interrogated the
aircrew about problems, and then did a personal inspection, checking
the landing gear, and looking for fuel or oil leaks. He found only
what he called “incidental damage” and remembered thinking “We've
got a clean airplane today.” At 10:18 that morning 31 year old
pilot Alan Gibson signed the reports detailing the fuel and
cargo on board.
Then the 29 passengers – including 10 children
returning from school vacation - re-boarded the aircraft. As they
did, at 10:19, a BOAC Argonout (DC 8) piston engine airliner also headed for
London, tail i.d. G-ALHJ , took off.
At
10:31am Central European time, 10 January, 1954, 33 year old First
Officer William Bury guided Yoke Peter into a sky with a thin and
broken ceiling above 15,000 feet. It was
near perfect flying weather, and not a storm in sight. Pilot Gibson had more than 6, 500 hours
of experience, and Bury, another 4,900 hours. Yoke Peter itself had
achieved 3,681 hours of safe, speedy and profitable travel.
Just
after take off Captain Gibson, who was handling the radio, called to
Able Love How Jig, asking “In due course, could you pass your
height of cloud cover, please?” Captain John Richard Johnson, on
the slower DC-8 (above), responded, “Well, we are currently at 20,000 feet. We'll
let you know when we pass through it.”
The
first “way point” for Yoke Peter was a directional radio beacon,
74 air miles northwest of Rome. At 10:42am Captain Gibson contacted
the airport, “We are abeam of the Civtavecchia beacon, flying at
23,000 feet.” Eight minutes later, at 10:51am, as Yoke Peter
climbed out over the Tyrrhenian Sea Gibson was heard from again,
calling, “George How Gig, from Yoke Victor.” Captain Johnson
quickly replied, “George Yoke Peter from George How Jig, go ahead”
Captain Gibson said, “George How Jig. Did you get my....”
Abruptly the radio went silent.
Johnson
was concerned by the way Captain Gibson had been cut off in
mid-sentence, and immediately tried to raise Yoke Peter again. When
there was no reply, he contacted Rome, “We lost all contact with BA
781, and then they seemed to disappear. Can you read them?” At
10:56 Rome called out to Yoke Peter. Again there was no reply,
because, by then, everyone on board, was dead.
Some
27,000 feet below on the ocean surface, some five miles south of the
iron rich Cape Calimati on Elba, two fishermen heard the Comet before
being suddenly startled by what 33 year old Luigi Papa called “...a
break in the air”. His partner, 31 year old Givanni Di Marco,
described “... three explosions, very quickly, one after the
other”. For a moment all was quiet. Luigi remembered, then “...I
heard a sound like thunder, but it was not like any thunder I had
heard before.” Givanni saw, several miles away, “...a silver
thing flash out of the clouds. . Smoke came from it. It hit the sea.
There was a great cloud of water.”
The
two men headed to the spot as quickly as they could. But, “By the
time I got there all was still again,” recalled Givanni di Marco.
“There were some bodies in the water. We began to pick them up.
There was nothing else we could do." Still in shock Luigi Pappi
said sadly, “Every time we went near a corpse we would
shout, come over here, come over here! Because they seemed still
alive, their eyes open. But when you got near you could see they were
dead.”
The
surface of the ocean was covered with debris and bodies from the innovative
Comet, north of the romantic island of Montecristo, east of the
prison island of Poanso, some 16 miles off the coast of Tuscany and 5
miles south of the fabled island of Elba in 400 to 600 feet of water.
There were no survivors.
And
from the instant of the crash, officials at De Haviland, BOAC, and
the British Air Ministry began to wonder, what the hell was wrong
with the Comet.
- 30
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