Date: 09 Dec 97 03:54:27
From: mweber@t140.aone.net.au (James Matthew Weber)
Organization: Customer of Access One Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
References: 1 2 3 4
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>The aircraft manufactures have learned a great deal since the development
>of the Concorde. Like the British Comet, the Americans have sit back and
>learned by the mistakes of others.. The Boeing 707 was a safer aircraft
>because of the Comet experiences. The 707 also took advantage of the bad
>press that the Comet received during its development and became a huge
>success in its time.
This really isn't accurage. The problem was De-Havilland had no
experience in building large pressurized aircraft, or large jet
aircraft. By the time Boeing built the Dash-80, they had already built
several large pressurized aircraft, as well as the B-47 and B-52.
In one of the books on the history of QANTAS, there is a discussion
about how it was the QANTAS selected the 707. In their evaluation, it
became clear that many of the negatives De Havilland had to say about
the 707 were a result of De Havilland's not adequately understanding
the problems. Boeing didn't need the Comet experience, they already
knew from other experience. Also the American were probably better
engineers than the British by that time, may well have had access to
better design tools even then. A lot of the 707 advantages stem from
better engineering analsysis of the problems. Interestingly enough,
this same problem also impacted Douglas to a lesser extent in the DC-8
design. They lacked the experience in building large jets. As one
Boeing official put it, the 707 always had better high altitude, high
speed handling characteristics than the DC-8. We had a lot more
experience than Douglas had.
