Profile – Bristol Brabazon

Before the days of jet-powered airliners, the Bristol Brabazon was designed to fly non-stop between London and New York. C. B. Bailey-Watson looks back to the evolution of this ambitious project.

Britain’s Largest Landplane the Bristol Brabazon

“The Brabazon was doomed from the start although, of course, nobody thought so at the time,” said Sir Archibald Russell. The designer of the Brabazon had been of Leslie Frise, the chief designer, of aircraft, of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, but the very advanced structural design of the aircraft owed its genesis to Russell, who succeeded Frise as chief designer and was later responsible for the design of the even more advanced Bristol Britannia and for leading the British design team of the Concorde supersonic airliner.

“Hindsight is, of course, an exact science,” he added with a twinkle.

I have always thought it an almost laughable epitome of a certain sort of sublime Britishness that in so dark a time of the Second World War – early 1943- the Cabinet set up a committee to advise on what sort of airliners the UK should build after the war. The recommendations of that committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Brabazon of Tara, might not have rung the bell in every instance, but then its distinguished members were no more prescient than the rest of us. It is a fair bet that no other body of people could have predicted to better effect at that time.

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