Brabazon Committee
Part Two
Boeing 707
In retrospect the majority of the Brabazon committee's suggestions were set up for failure.
Invariably the designs were tailored to a single company, BOAC or BEA, and therefore had less
appeal to other airlines. In addition they apparently failed to consider the side-effects of
greatly increasing route capacity as these planes would bring, and thought that their passengers
would continue to be the rich, the only ones able to afford air travel at the time. This led to a
number of unrealistic requirements, and doomed the Type I design to carry considerably fewer
passengers than it could, thereby making it too expensive to operate.
Douglas DC-8
The only complete success of the Brabazon types was the Type IIB Viscount, which went on to be
produced in the hundreds. The IIA was produced in only limited numbers, as the IIB was a far
better design. The Type I Brabazon was built to only one example, which was broken up along with
the uncompleted second prototype. The Type III should have been a success, but a series of delays
before entering service forced it to compete with newly-introduced jet designs from the US, with
which it could simply not compare. The Type IV Comet almost became an outstanding success, but
three mysterious crashes grounded them all for long enough that they too were outdated by the
time they were able to re-enter the market.
BAC 1-11
Hawker Siddeley Trident
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, Hawker Siddeley Trident and Vickers VC10 were unable to address this issue.
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.
Vickers VC10
Concorde
