A Window Design Mistake that Proved Catastrophic
For most of the commercial air travel era, Boeing has been the dominant player in passenger planes. However, there was a time in the early 1950s when reasonable people could have predicted that the future of passenger planes belonged to British aircraft manufacturer de Havilland, with Boeing a distant second. The reason was the de Havilland Comet – history’s first commercial jet liner. Its prototype first flew in 1949, and it 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 when it made its debut.
The Comet’s designers chose large, square windows, because of aesthetic reasons: they looked better than round “porthole” style windows. Unfortunately for de Havilland, and for dozens of Comet passengers who died in a series of crashes, designers in those days had not yet grasped the notion of metal fatigue. Stresses piled up at the corners of the Comet’s square windows, and caused catastrophic fuselage breaches midflight. The result was a series of fatal crashes. Since the Comets often broke apart high altitudes and above water, it took time to figure out the problem. Once the culprit was identified, the entire Comet fleet was pulled out of service. De Havilland never recovered: while the Comet was being redesigned with round windows and thicker fuselages, the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 hit the market, and became hits with airliners.