de Havilland

~ the obit ~

The de Havilland Aircraft Company Limited was incorporated on 26 September 1920 at Stag Lane, and it spent the 1920s doing something no British manufacturer had managed: making flying affordable. The DH.60 Moth first flew on 22 February 1925, and the Tiger Moth that followed it taught most of the pilots the Commonwealth put in the air during the next war. The company moved to Hatfield, which for the next forty years was where British aviation went to find out what was possible.

The Mosquito is the aircraft everyone remembers, and it was a strange thing to build in 1940. Wood, in an industry that had gone to metal, framed and glued by furniture firms and piano makers because the aircraft factories were full. It was one of the fastest aircraft of the war for the first two years it flew. The family paid for it directly. John de Havilland, the founder's son, died on 23 August 1943 when two Mosquito FB.VIs collided on a test flight near St Albans and both disintegrated, killing all four men aboard. His brother Geoffrey, the company's chief test pilot, was killed on 27 September 1946 when the swept-wing DH.108 broke up in a dive over Egypt Bay at Mach 0.88.

What finished the company was not a crash but an accounting problem dressed as industrial policy. The Comet disasters cost de Havilland four years and its lead in jet airliners, and by the time the British government started pushing the aircraft industry into a handful of large groups, the firm was a takeover target rather than a consolidator. Hawker Siddeley bought it in 1960 and kept it as a separate company until 1963, when it became the de Havilland Division and every type in production or development had its DH designation rewritten as HS. There was no announcement worth the name. The lettering just changed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the square windows ~

The prototype Comet flew from Hatfield on 27 July 1949 for thirty-one minutes. BOAC put G-ALYP into scheduled service on 2 May 1952, London to Johannesburg, and for two years Britain owned the jet age outright. Then on 10 January 1954 the same airframe broke apart over the Mediterranean near Elba with thirty-five people aboard. Modifications were made and the fleet went back up. On 8 April 1954 G-ALYY came apart near Stromboli with twenty-one aboard. The certificate of airworthiness was withdrawn the same day.

Popular memory has settled on the square windows, and that is close enough to be useful and wrong enough to be worth correcting. The fuselage was failing from fatigue, but the tank tests put the origin at bolt holes around a cutout near an escape hatch, in a skin that had been punched rather than drilled. Twelve Comet 1s existed in service and test. The Comet 4 eventually opened transatlantic jet service on 4 October 1958, and within the same month Pan Am started flying the Boeing 707, which was bigger and cheaper per seat.

~ the tank at farnborough ~

On 24 June 1954 the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough had a whole Comet fuselage, G-ALYU, submerged in a water tank and pressurized in cycles until it burst open at 3,057 of them. Lord Cohen's committee was appointed on 19 October to write up what it meant. The answer changed the rules for every pressurized airliner built since: test a full-scale airframe to destruction, and round and reinforce every cutout in the skin. de Havilland lost the market it invented and then paid for the safety standard the winners flew under, which is a lousy trade and a real inheritance.

~ the mosquitos that went to turkey ~

Turkey was one of the postwar Mosquito operators. Ex-RAF FB.6s were sold on to the Türk Hava Kuvvetleri and went through Fairey Aviation's line at Manchester Ringway for overhaul across 1947 and 1948 before delivery, which put a Hatfield-designed wooden strike aircraft in Turkish markings close to forty years before I was born. It was the air force's serious step out of the piston-trainer era and into something that could actually reach a target.

The civil side skipped de Havilland entirely. Turkish Airlines went from propeller airliners straight to American jets in the second half of the 1960s, by which point the DH letters were already gone from anything new. There is no Turkish Comet story to tell, and the reason is just timing: the aircraft that would have been sold into that market spent 1954 in pieces on a hangar floor at Farnborough.

~ the name in canada ~

de Havilland Canada was a 1928 subsidiary that outlived its parent by a long way. Boeing bought it in December 1985 and passed it to Bombardier in 1992. In November 2018 Longview Aviation Capital acquired the Dash 8 program along with the brand, closing the deal on 3 June 2019 as De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited. So the name is being painted on new airframes right now. It belongs to a Canadian company that was sold away from Hatfield forty years ago, and the firm Geoffrey de Havilland incorporated in 1920 has been gone since the year the letters changed.

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