Brabazon Committee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Brabazon Committee was a committee formed in 1943 to investigate the future needs of the British civilian airliner market. It was the result of concerns about the United Kingdom's commercial aircraft position after the end of the Second World War.

[edit] Background

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 heavy bombers. This would leave the UK with little experience in transport construction by 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.

A committee began meeting in February 1943 under the leadership of Lord Brabazon of Tara in order to investigate the future needs of the British civilian airliner market. They studied a number of designs and technical considerations, and delivered a report calling for the construction of four general designs studied by the committee and members of the state-owned airlines British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and later British European Airways (BEA).

[edit] Report

The report identified four types of aircraft that would be required after the war.

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 short haul 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. It was added at the personal urging of one of the committee members, Geoffrey de Havilland whose company was involved in development of Britain's first jet fighters. 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 the specification of one of the types.

[edit] The aircraft

In 1944, the Ministry of Supply started the process for contracts for all of these planes. This was carried out in the normal way for government aircraft production. A Ministry Specification was issued and aircraft companies provided designs or prototypes to the specification. For the Type IIB the specification was 8/46, and the competing aircraft included the Vickers VC2 and the Armstrong Whitworth AW.55 Apollo.

After a short selection process the Type I was given to the Bristol Aeroplane Company who produced the Bristol Brabazon. The Type IIA design selected became the Airspeed Ambassador. The Vickers design won the IIB as the Viceroy - later to be named the Vickers Viscount. The Type III (specification C2/47) was another success for Bristol as the Britannia. 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 the United Kingdom's needs, as exemplified by the companies, whether BOAC or BEA. As a result they did not necessarily fit the needs of other airlines and consequently had less appeal to those airlines. In addition they apparently failed to consider the side-effects of greatly increasing route capacity. They believed that the passengers of the aircraft would be the particularly well-off or government employees, as they were the only ones able to afford air travel at the time. This led to a number of what turned out to be unrealistic requirements. In particular this doomed the Type I design which by allowing a large amount of space per passenger in consideration of the long journey duration kept its operating costs high and 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 it was eclipsed by the higher speed of the Type IIB turboprop. Only a single Brabazon prototype was built and flown before it was broken up along with the uncompleted second prototype. The Type III should have been a success, but a series of delays before and after 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 unexplained crashes grounded them and the design changes required delayed reintroduction for long enough that the US was able to catch up with the 707.

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 although successful would be unable to win a substantial part of it back again. 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.