The investigation that followed broke new ground in aviation safety. Comet flights were suspended, and production of the British jet was halted. In 19, three Comets broke up soon after taking off killing all on board, two over the Mediterranean as they climbed in January and April that year from RomeвЂ™s Ciampino airport, and a third caught in a thunder squall on the Calcutta to Delhi leg of a BOAC flight from Singapore to London. And, yet, because the nature of metal fatigue, new construction techniques and repeated re-pressurisation of airliner cabins was little understood, early Comets were to fail in spectacularly fatal fashion. It could cross the Atlantic in style and, for a moment, it looked as Britain might truly lead the Jet Age.

Launched into service with BOAC in 1952, the Comet was the worldвЂ™s first jet airliner. But these accidents led to technical improvements and changes in operations and legislation that were to make civil aviation increasingly safe.ДЄmong the most shocking were the three occasions, within a year, when brand new de Havilland Comet airliners broke up in flight. The development of fast jet flight led to the death of legions of test pilots, notoriously during the 1950s. This new chapter was to be told by jet airliners, by those who designed and tested them, and those fare-paying passengers who took to the air in these new and unproven machines. Now, the industry was to expand rapidly, its future looking towards carrying untold numbers of passengers and prodigious amounts of freight worldwide.

Airliners had been small, if charmingly fitted out at their best like first class shipвЂ™s cabins or Pullman railway carriages. Before the Second World War, civil aviation was strictly the realm of the wealthy, adventurers, government officials and lucky journalists. Roy Chadwick, the designer who gave us the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered Lancaster and the striking Vulcan V-bomber died in August 1947 when his prototype Avro Tudor airliner crashed in the Lake District, the result of a maintenance error.Д¬hadwick crashed and died at the very time a new post-war aviation industry was taking flight. He was the first to die in a British air accident. Today, the Rolls-Royce logo on the engines of an airliner is taken as a guarantee of smooth-spinning and reliable power yet, 32-year-old Charles Rolls himself was killed at Bournemouth in July 1910 when the tail of his Wright Flyer fell off. These tragedies were part of a long and fraught process that helped make flying as safe as it is today.

Aeroplanes suffered a catalogue of catastrophic construction and engineering failures compounded by bad weather and pilot error. Sacrifices were made in great numbers in the early days of powered flight. Even when a part of the science of flight had been understood, men like Otto Lilienthal, a 19th Century German pioneer who experimented with gliders, were doomed, their contraptions too heavy and too unresponsive to allow their brave pilots to chase birds or even to get much above ground. Soon enough, this figure will rise to a million: a million passengers, flown safely, if not always comfortably, across countries and continents, and with little call for comment.Д«efore engines could lift heavier-than-air machines convincingly off the ground, any attempt at flight had been dangerous, and yet for hundreds of years, adventurers strapped wings to their arms, and leapt off hilltops and towers in the vain hope of flying. At any one time hundreds of thousands of us are cocooned in pressurised cabins scything through the cold upper reaches of the troposphere.

Third age total war crashing