COMET - Chapter Three - Spirits Of The Dead

 

I ask you to witness the sad little fleet dock in the port of Azzuro (above), on Elba's eastern shore. It is some 7 hours since Yoke Peter fell into the cold Tyrryenian Sea - 10 January, 1954. From the trawler Francesco Guiseppe they carry the pale corpse of a 10 or 11 year old boy, strapped atop a wooden plank and covered by a fresh white sheet. The somber fishermen then carry off the body of a 29 year old stewardess, Jean Evelyn Clark.

She is followed by a procession of 12 more shroud draped bodies up the dirt road and into the stone fortress of Chiesa di San Giacomo Maggiore (above). 

In the fort's small, austere, baroque chapel the burdens are laid before the altar. 

Candles are lighted and prayers are intoned. And if the spirits of the dead should have awakened, they must have been surprised to find themselves in such a dark sanctuary, such a long way from the cold thin air so close to heaven.

 Because de Havilland had built Britain's second jet fighter, the single engine Vampire (which went into service in April of 1945), they believed they were uniquely qualified to build the Trans-Atlantic passenger jets envisioned by the Brabazon Committee. However these would require a range of over 3,000 miles. But the second generation Ghost engines burned 3 – 4 times more fuel at 10,000 feet than conventional internal combustion engines, putting New York well beyond their range. So the cautious de Havilland company decided to approach trans-Atlantic flights in stages.

The Comet 1 would establish profitable routes tying the the British empire together, with flights between London and Singapore or South Africa. 

These largely overland routes would allow refueling stops every thousand miles or so, over well established flight paths, using already established ground facilities. Once the Comet was proven and the three times more powerful Rolls-Royce Avon engines had completed their testing, de Havilland would build the larger transcontinental Comet 2, and then the even larger Comet 3. So from the beginning the Comet 1 and it's Ghost engines were envisioned as test beds.

Throughout 1947 and 1948 de Havilland subjected the Comet fuselage and its over-sized square windows (above)  to twice anticipated pressures, through 16,000 cycles from sea level to 36,000 feet and back, simulating over 40,000 service hours. 

Since each rivet holding the Comet's aluminum skin required a hole be punched, the decision was to use the adhesive “Redux”, proven in combat on the plywood fighter/bomber, the Mosquito. It would be used on the Comet primarily “...to affix stiffening...to wing and fuselage panels, the resulting panel being both stronger and lighter than a riveted structure.” After all this was tested and proven, the design was finalized and built.

Not until after three years of testing did the Comet fly. The test pilot John Cunningham described this marvel of modern technology as “Very promising. Very quick.” British Overseas Aircraft Company bought 8 Comet 1's. 

Air France  (above) bought a pair,  South African Airways bought another two, as did Canadian Pacific Airways.  And the American giant, Pan American World Airways, signed up to buy three of the Comet 3s, with an option to buy 7 more the following year. With each Comet sold abroad representing over half a million pounds in badly needed foreign currency, and with “eight BOAC Comets leaving London each week: three to Johannesburg, two to Tokyo, two to Singapore and one to Colombo”, by the summer of 1953 it seemed the Comet was indeed a revolution in passenger travel.

However there were some annoying problems. The vacuum tubes in the navigation system tended to overheat. The cockpit's windows would occasionally fog over. And the seals on the hydraulic control system, which powered the flaps and tail rudder, were faulty on the first four Comets. Crews solved this problem by carry extra cans of fluid, and would top off the system whenever they spotted fluid on the tarmac.

And then there those under powered Ghost engines. In late October 1952 a BOAC Comet taking off from Rome, Yoke Zebra, failed to reach V-2, the speed at which pilots would lift the nose to become airborne. Unable to lift up or stop, Yoke Zebra overran the runway and broke the landing gear (above).  Pilot Peter Duffrey, who had flown the Comet into Rome,  found Yoke Zebra, “... just sitting there hissing – it (had) ripped the belly tank out and there was fuel everywhere.” Luckily there was no fire and no loss of life.  

But Duffrey diagnosed the problem immediately. The pilot had raised the nose too high, and stalled the aircraft. But the pilot was not helped by the hydraulic system. Duffrey noted, “...the lack of feedback on the controls...allowed you to pull-back as much as you wanted.” That made it easy to stall the aircraft.

That mistake was repeated on 3 March 1953 during the delivery flight of a Canadian Pacific Comet, this time just after lifting off from Calcutta. This time all six crew members and the six passengers on board were killed. A week later a Comet test flight out of Karachi, Pakistan, stalled after lift off and slammed into a stone bridge, killing 11 technicians and crew. This crash cost de Havilland the second Comet the Canadians had ordered but now refused to accept. 

Then, in June, it happened again, this time in Dakar, Senegal. Said Duffrey, “As pilots we were becoming very concerned.” In response, new take-off instructions were issued to pilots, and in all future Comets modifications would be made to the wings, and all future Comets would be fitted with weather radars.

Then had come the Yoke Victor tragedy over Jagalgori, India (above). It had been blamed on the weather, but pilot error had not been ruled out. Nor had sabotage. There were a lot of people in Asia and Africa who had an grudge with the British Empire. And a lot of older pilots were suspicious about those new hydraulic controls. And now there was this new disaster over the Tyrryenian Sea. The negative publicity was certain to kill desperately needed sales. 

With 24 hours of prodding from Arnold Alexander Hall (above), Director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, both de Havilland and BOAC agreed to temporarily ground all Comets. Hall then opened a comprehensive investigation, which began by looking for nefarious causes and actors.

Admiral Louis Francis Mountbatten (above), 1^st Earl of Burma and Commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, was ordered to recover as much of Yoke Peter as possible. 

However the Comet tragedy coincided with a series of devastating 7.0 and above earthquakes in Greece, which followed the ruinous Greek Civil War. Mountbatten was also the NATO commander in the Med and in that role, the fragile state of Greek politics and economics made relief efforts the priority. 

Although he had to continuously shift his resources, Mountbatten still managed to maintain at least one frigate with SONAR and at least one British minesweeper on station in a grid pattern search for debris of Yoke Peter, directing 5 local fishing trawlers dragging the bottom.

It was not easy. One engineer, viewing the search through a primitive video system, described the ocean bottom as looking “as though someone had upended a waste-paper basket”. Still, by 15 March – 65 days after the crash – the Royal Navy had recovered a large section of the front of the fuselage and part of the wings. Four days later they had recovered all 4 Ghost engines. If anyone had noticed the similarity in the way Yoke Peter had broken apart in January and the the pattern Yoke Victor had fallen from the sky 7 months earlier, they were not talking. Not yet.

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THE COMET Chapter One Not Like Any Thunder

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. 

Comet Take Off

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 commercial 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 8^th 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 12^th 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.

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COMET - Chapter Three - Spirits Of The Dead

 

I ask you to witness the sad little fleet dock in the port of Azzuro (above), on Elba's eastern shore. It is some 7 hours since Yoke Peter fell into the cold Tyrrhenian Sea, and dusk is settling over the strait of Piombino - 10 January, 1954.  From the trawler Francesco Guiseppe they carry the pale corpse of a 10 or 11 year old boy, strapped atop a wooden plank and covered by a fresh white sheet. The somber fishermen then carry off the body Jean Evelyn Clark, a 29 year old stewardess. 

She is followed by a procession of 12 more shroud draped bodies up the dirt road and into the stone fortress of Chiesa di San Giacomo Maggiore (above). 

In the fort's small, austere, baroque chapel the burdens are laid before the altar. 

Candles are lighted and prayers are intoned. And if the spirits of the dead should have awakened, they must have been surprised to find themselves in such a dark sanctuary, such a long way from the cold thin air so close to heaven where they died.

 Because de Havilland had built Britain's second jet fighter, the single engine Vampire (which went into service in April of 1945), they believed they were uniquely qualified to build the Trans-Atlantic passenger jets envisioned by the Brabazon Committee. However these would require a range of over 3,000 miles. And the second generation Ghost engines burned 3 – 4 times more fuel at 10,000 feet than conventional internal combustion engines, putting New York well beyond their range. So the cautious de Havilland company decided to approach trans-Atlantic flights in stages.

The Comet 1 would establish profitable routes tying the the British empire together, with flights between London and Singapore or South Africa. 

These largely overland routes would allow refueling stops every thousand miles or so, over well established paths, using already established ground facilities. Once the Comet was proven and the three times more powerful Rolls-Royce Avon engines had completed their testing, de Havilland would build the larger transcontinental Comet 2, and then the even larger Comet 3. So from the beginning the Comet 1 and it's Ghost engines were envisioned as test beds.

Throughout 1947 and 1948 de Havilland subjected the Comet fuselage and its over-sized square windows (above)  to twice anticipated pressures, through 16,000 cycles from sea level to 36,000 feet and back, simulating over 40,000 service hours. 

Since each rivet holding the Comet's aluminum skin required a hole be punched, the decision was made to use the adhesive “Redux”, proven in combat on the plywood fighter/bomber, the Mosquito. It would be used on the Comet primarily “...to affix stiffening...to wing and fuselage panels, the resulting panel being both stronger and lighter than a riveted structure.” After all this was tested and proven, the design was finalized and built.

Not until after three years of testing did the Comet fly. The test pilot John Cunningham described this marvel of modern technology as “Very promising. Very quick.” British Overseas Aircraft Company bought 8 Comet 1's. 

Air France  (above) bought a pair,  South African Airways bought another two, as did Canadian Pacific Airways.  And the American giant, Pan American World Airways, signed up to buy three of the Comet 3s, with an option to buy 7 more the following year. With each Comet sold abroad representing over half a million pounds in badly needed foreign currency, and with “eight BOAC Comets leaving London each week: three to Johannesburg, two to Tokyo, two to Singapore and one to Colombo”, by the summer of 1953 it seemed the Comet was indeed a revolution in passenger travel.

However there were some annoying problems. The vacuum tubes in the navigation system tended to overheat. The cockpit's windows would occasionally fog over. And the seals on the hydraulic control system, which powered the flaps and tail rudder, were faulty on the first four Comets. Crews solved this problem by carry extra cans of fluid, and would top off the system whenever they spotted fluid on the tarmac.

And then there those under powered Ghost engines. In late October 1952 a BOAC Comet taking off from Rome, Yoke Zebra, failed to reach V-2, the speed at which pilots would lift the nose to become airborne. Unable to lift up or stop, Yoke Zebra overran the runway and broke the landing gear (above).  Pilot Peter Duffrey, who had flown the Comet into Rome,  found Yoke Zebra, “... just sitting there hissing – it (had) ripped the belly tank out and there was fuel everywhere.” Luckily there was no fire and no loss of life.  

But Duffrey diagnosed the problem immediately. The pilot had raised the nose too high after liftoff, and stalled the aircraft. But the pilot was not helped by the hydraulic system. Duffrey noted, “...the lack of feedback on the controls...allowed you to pull-back as much as you wanted.” That made it easy to stall the aircraft.

That mistake was repeated on 3 March 1953 during the unladen delivery flight of a Canadian Pacific Comet, this time just after lifting off from Calcutta. This time all six crew members and the six passengers on board were killed. A week later a Comet test flight out of Karachi, Pakistan, stalled after lift off and slammed into a stone bridge, killing 11 technicians and crew. This crash cost de Havilland the second Comet the Canadians had ordered but not yet taken delivery on. 

Then, in June, it happened again, this time in Dakar, Senegal. Said Duffrey, “As pilots we were becoming very concerned.” In response, new take-off instructions were issued to pilots, and in all future Comets modifications would be made to the wings, and all future Comets would be fitted with weather radars.

Then had come the Yoke Victor tragedy over Jagalgori, India (above). It had been blamed on the weather, but pilot error had not been ruled out. Nor had sabotage. There were a lot of people in Asia and Africa who had an grudge with the British Empire. And a lot of older pilots were suspicious about those new hydraulic controls. And now there was this new disaster over the Tyrryenian Sea. The negative publicity was certain to kill desperately needed sales. 

With 24 hours of prodding from Arnold Alexander Hall (above), Director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, both de Havilland and BOAC agreed to temporarily ground all Comets. Hall then opened a comprehensive investigation, which began by looking for nefarious causes and actors.

Admiral Louis Francis Mountbatten (above), 1^st Earl of Burma and Commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, was ordered to recover as much of Yoke Peter as possible. 

However the Comet tragedy coincided with a series of devastating 7.0 and above earthquakes in Greece, which followed the ruinous Greek Civil War. Mountbatten was also the NATO commander in the Med and in that role, the fragile state of Greek politics and economics made relief efforts the priority over Comet recovery. 

Although he had to continuously shift his resources, Mountbatten still managed to maintain at least one frigate with SONAR and at least one British minesweeper on station in a grid pattern search for debris of Yoke Peter, directing 5 local fishing trawlers dragging the bottom.

It was not easy. One engineer, viewing the search through a primitive video system, described the ocean bottom as looking “as though someone had upended a waste-paper basket”. Still, by 15 March – 65 days after the crash – the Royal Navy had recovered a large section of the front of the fuselage and part of the wings. Four days later they had recovered all 4 Ghost engines. If anyone had noticed the similarity in the way Yoke Peter had broken apart in January and the the pattern Yoke Victor had fallen from the sky 7 months earlier, they were not talking in public.

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