The Comets are coming*

The BCPA board accepted a recommendation to look at the Comet and in late 1952 Watkins flew from London to Colombo by Comet and then to Singapore with a Merlin-powered Argonaut. He commented that having his teeth rattled in the Argonaut after the Comet’s smoothness was a Revelation.

The Comet 1’s short range ruled it out for a Pacific route but the Comet 2 would have been suitable. Underlining interest in trans-Pacific flights, Canadian Pacific was acquiring Comet 2s for a similar Pacific service.

BCPA drew up a specification and when this writer visited Watkins he surprised when he showed me drawings for a BCPA Comet 2.

“There you are. You’re one of the very few people to have seen it,” he said.

Watkins said there was incorrect information in some books claiming BCPA had ordered six Comets. That was incorrect, it had planned to start with a fleet of two but never ordered them and had not paid any Money.

In addition to overseas service BCPA had planned to operate the Comet on a domestic service to Perth. TAA had also considered the Comet for the Perth service and conducted a study and would have gone ahead if it could get the revolutionary new aircraft in a timely fashion. But in the end it wanted something with a shorter range than the Comet but greater than the Viscount and did not proceed with plans to introduce the new jet into its fleet.

So what went wrong with Australia’s Comet aspirations? On May 2 1953 BOAC Comet 1 G-ALYV (c/n 06008) took off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport continuing on a flight to London which commenced in Singapore. After reaching 10,000ft it flew into an exceptionally heavy tropical thunderstorm and suddenly disintegrated near the village of Jugalgari 30 miles from Calcutta with the loss of all six crew and 37 passengers. An enquiry attributed the loss to a structural failure caused by over-stressing caused by either severe gusts in the thunder squall or by over-controlling or loss of control by the pilot passing through the thunderstorm.

Concerned at this accident, Watkins suggested to TAA’s chairman Norman Watt that he should investigate the accident. He discovered that the Comet had taken off with only 200 gallons of hot kerosene in the 1,000 gallon capacity belly tank, loaded from a tank wagon standing in Calcutta’s hot afternoon sun. He measured the temperature of fuel in another tanker and it registered 95 degrees F. The Comet lost had taken extra fuel because the weather looked doubtful at the next stop in Delhi.

Watkins said kerosene has the opposite characteristic from aviation gasoline in that it’s under hot conditions when you are liable to get an explosive mixture of air/ kerosene vapour. In the case of aviation gasoline it’s exactly the opposite – it’s only in very cold conditions where you can get an explosive mixture over the tank and there have been cases of wings exploding at high level over the Atlantic with a lightning strike with petrol in the tank.

Watkins had a previous stint in India in 1950, spending about six months with the Air Transport Enquiry Committee and through this experience had full access to information. He knew many people in the administration and was in a good position to discuss matters with the chief inspector of accidents and get access to all the wreckage that was still there (a lot of it had been taken back to England). But all the detailed photographs of the wreckage where it lay and eyewitness reports were available.

Examination of the wreckage showed the actual fuel tank was all rounded as if there had been an explosion in it. In addition flaming wreckage had come down from the cloud. Watkins said a possible cause was an inflight fuel tank explosion possibly attributed to a lightning strike.

“Everybody says it can’t happen but we have had plenty of proof that it can happen,” he told me.

Watkins’ recommendation to BCPA was that it suspend negotiations with de Havillands until there was a clear explanation of what went on with this accident. But before BCPA got this explanation of the Calcutta loss, two Comets had crashed in the Mediterranean and the type had been grounded.

Faced with these events the BCPA Comet purchase never Proceeded.

The Canadian Pacific Comet venture across the Pacific never happened either. Its first Comet 1A, CF-CUN Empress of Hawaii (c/n 06014), was lost at Karachi on March 3 1953 one day after it had been delivered, in the first Comet fatal accident following a ground stall on its delivery flight. It was en route to Sydney to inaugurate the Sydney-Vancouver service. The purchase of sister aircraft CF-CUM was cancelled and the planned acquisition of three Comet 2s and a fourth on option were all cancelled following the 1954 Comet accidents.

*With apologies to Captain W E Johns’ first Biggles book The Camels Are Coming published in 1932.

With this issue onwards Yesteryear takes on a new format where it will reflect upon aircraft and people of significance in Australian aviation history.