de Havilland Comet reference material

I have the new Crowood book. It’s very nice.
It depends how deep and technical you need to go on the Comet disasters, but it seems to have a good section on it.

Thanks for the help everyone – Flightglobal is, as you say, going to be very useful, but I don’t want every single reference for my dissertation to be from there! Timbo, thanks for the offer – I dropped an e-mail to the CAA library last night about visiting their aviation library to see if they have the reports on the G-ALYP inquiry (as well as anything on G-ALYY) so should be alright for that one.

Cheers, Rob

The Air-Britain published an excellent book on the Comet by Martin Painter which should also provides data on such incidents.

See www.air-britain.com or https://www.air-britain.co.uk/

G-APDK

Not long back I sold a full original transcript from the Comet inquiry which went into very specific detail into all aspects of the failures.. Would it help if I tried to find the address of the chap I sold it to, maybe you could drop him an email?

As AK suggests, you can’t do any better than trawlling through the Flight Global archives, especially as they were the reports from the time, without any historical ‘spin’ added to them.

The National Archive should hold information on the accidents, and the official accident reports, they are searchable on line (under AIR) aswel.

Putnams’ British Civil Aircraft (Vol.1?) provides a straight forward listing of the aircraft and accidents along with some background info.

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1955/1955%20-%200194.html

Rob,

There are a few contemporary books on the enquiry,which give a good basis.

There is a comprehensive report published at the time, which we have a copy of at the museum.

Much of it used to be online at Marc Schaeffer’s excellent website, but it appears to have become moribund. Might be worth a rummage in the wayback machine.

Bruce

One advantage of working at Boscombe Down is easy access to electronic copies of some of the old reports, one of which is a collection of the reports covering the Comet accident investigation and subsequent laboratory tests, in total 728 pages of pdf.
This sad old engineer is kept entertained / educated reading them during his lunch break.

Hi Rob,
As it’s a dissertation, did you get photos of the hatch and Comet model of Yoke Peter in the Science Museum’s Making of Modern Britain exhibition? I’ve got some if you need them.
Cheers

I have always wanted to read the actual reports on the crashes to get the full details without bias.

BA Archives

Another possibility would be the British Airways Archives at Heathrow. I went there for some research a while ago, and was amazed at the documents they hold. Very nice people too, but you need to let them know what you are after, as they are voluntary part timers!

Laurence

Thanks Pagen

Will

I have always wanted to read the actual reports on the crashes to get the full details without bias.

the TNA is good place to go then, as not only do they have the accident reports, but also the Navy accounts of recovery, the airliners own internal enquirys, Cabinet office & foreign office reports, photographic records, and all manner of paperwork that you wouln’t immediately think of.

Hi Rob,
As it’s a dissertation, did you get photos of the hatch and Comet model of Yoke Peter in the Science Museum’s Making of Modern Britain exhibition? I’ve got some if you need them.
Cheers

Cheers – I was down there last Friday but i’ll be back with my camera at some point to get some photos of the Comet bits as well as the Electra, SF Cody’s aircraft etc

Thanks for the new suggestions guys, hadn’t thought about the National Archives