Brabazon Committee

In 1942, during World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom agreed to split responsibility for aircraft construction; the US would concentrate on transport aircraft while the UK would concentrate on their heavy bombers. This would leave the UK with little experience in transport construction at the end of the war, a worrying development given the production infrastructure that would now be useless. Moreover the massive infrastructure in the US would allow them to produce civilian designs at low cost.

Starting in February 1943 a committee met under the leadership of Lord Brabazon of Tara in order to investigate the future needs of the British civilian airliner market. The Brabazon Committee studied a number of designs and technical considerations, and delivered a report calling for the construction of four general designs they had studied along with members of the airlines BOAC and BEA.

Type I was a very large transatlantic airliner serving the high-volume routes like London-New York, seating its passengers in luxury for the 12-hour trip.

Type II was a feederliner intended to replace the DC-3 and De Havilland Dragon Rapide, although BEA suggested a larger and much more capable design. Type II was later split into two designs, IIA was a piston-powered aircraft, and the IIB was turboprop powered.

Type III called for a larger medium-range aircraft for various multi-hop routes serving the British Empire.

Type IV was the most advanced of them all, a jet-powered 100-seat design. Added at the personal urging of one of the committee members, Geoffrey de Havilland, the Type IV could, if the whole concept of a jet airliner could be made to work, be able to replace the Type III outright, and many of the duties of the other planes in shorter routes.

The committee published versions of the report several times between August 1943 and November 1945, each time further solidifying one of the types. In 1944, the Ministry of Supply started a tender process for contracts for all of these planes. After a short selection process the Type I was given to the Bristol Aeroplane Company and was produced as the Brabazon, Type IIA became the Airspeed Ambassador and IIB the Vickers Viscount, Type III also went to Bristol as the Britannia and the Type IV went (unsurprisingly) to De Havilland and would become the world's first jet airliner, the Comet.

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, 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.

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.

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 and Vickers VC-10 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.