20. The Seemingly Minor Design Choice That Turned Out to be a Catastrophically Bad Idea
Even before the series of catastrophic 737 Max dulled Boeing’s shine, Airbus had been threatening to eclipse the American airplane manufacturing giant. However, until the recent 737 Max fiasco, things had been going great for Boeing for as long as anybody could remember. Throughout most of the commercial travel era, Boeing was the dominant player in passenger planes. Nonetheless, there was a time in the early 1950s when many reasonable people predicted that the future of passenger planes belonged to Britain’s de Havilland Aircraft Company, with Boeing a distant second.
The reason was the de Havilland Comet, history’s first commercial jet liner. Its prototype first flew in 1949, then Comets went into production and hit the market in 1952. Fast and sleek, with a pressurized cabin that was comfortable, relatively quiet, and featured large square windows, the Comet cut six hours of travel time between London and New York. It was the world’s most promising passenger plane. Then, it was discovered that a seemingly minor design choice had been a bad idea.