World War II was not yet over when Lord Brabazon, Britain's minister of aircraft production, convened a group intended to plan for the needs of the country's post-war civilian aircraft market. At the top of the Brabazon Committee's list of six types of aircraft was a luxurious airliner that would be capable of carrying 100 passengers nonstop from London to New York. The job of designing the plane was given to one of Britain's oldest and most capable aircraft companies, the Bristol Aeroplane Company, in 1943.
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To a modern traveler, for whom luxury means not having his windpipe crushed by the reclined seatback in front of him, the Bristol Brabazon I's specifications must seem like a fairy tale. Passengers were to be provided not only with comfortable seats with oodles of legroom, but with separate sleeping compartments, dressing rooms, a dining room and a cinema. All of this meant that the plane would have to be enormous--the largest built to date, in fact. With a wingspan of 230 feet and an overall length of 177 feet, the Brabazon covered as much real estate as four Boeing B-17 heavy bombers.
Getting the 145-ton Brabazon airborne, the engineers calculated, would require 20,000 horsepower, to be supplied by eight 18-cylinder Bristol Centaurus radial engines, each displacing 53,600cc. Jet engines were ruled out, because the early designs lacked the fuel efficiency needed for a 12-hour transatlantic crossing against jet stream headwinds. The Centaurus engines were mounted in pairs in the wings, driving contra-rotating, 16-foot-diameter wooden propellers. The Brabazon carried enough fuel to cover 5,500 miles at a cruising speed of 250 MPH.
There was intense public curiosity when the Brabazon made its maiden flight on September 4, 1949. Bristol showed off the plane at air shows, and took airline executives and VIPs on demonstration flights. In all, the Brabazon made 164 flights, totaling 382 hours in the air, over the course of three years. But in the end, both the air carriers and the military turned thumbs-down on the plane, judging it too expensive to operate. The Brabazon Mk I and the unfinished Mk II, built at a cost of more than £8 million, were sold for scrap.
In hindsight, the handwriting was already on the wall before the Brabazon ever took wing. About five weeks earlier, the de Havilland Comet, the first production jet airliner, had made its first flight. Though the Comet suffered significant teething pains, the age of jet transport had arrived; passengers preferred jets to props, even if they couldn't manage the crossing without stopping for fuel in such places as Gander, Newfoundland, and Shannon, Ireland.
The Brabazon can't be called a design failure, because it did exactly what it was asked to do. The problem, as noted aviation journalist Bill Gunston noted in a 1987 BBC documentary, was that "the customer for the Brabazon was a ministry. And ministries don't buy airplanes."
This article originally appeared in the June, 2013 issue of Hemmings Motor News.
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