1953: LONDON to TOKYO in Just 36 HOURS! | Newsreel | Retro Transport | BBC Archive
“In a day and a half, the comet has flown over 14 countries, travelled over half way round the world, and cut what until this morning was an 86-hour journey, into a 36-hour one.”
The BOAC Comet now travels from London to Tokyo, more than halving the time it takes to travel between the two great cities. The first official flight is today, but BBC television cameras went on an earlier training flight to see what the journey is going to be like. Charles Gardner reports.
Clip taken from BBC Television Newsreel, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 3 April, 1953.
You have now entered the BBC Archive, a time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you with classic clips from the BBC vaults.
Make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a single stop on our amazing journey through the BBC Archive – https://www.youtube.com/c/BBCArchive?sub_confirmation=1
You can also dive into plenty more BBC Archive on our website – https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive
24 Comments
Okinawa is showing incorrectly on the map
TIL that the Comet was the first jet aircraft to arrive in Manila, I didn't even know that it was even a stop on it's London – Tokyo run.
You can feel the confidence and smugness in that voice. EVERYTHING belongs to the British Empire. Only 10 years later, the Comet is at the bottom of the sea, BOAC is bancrupt and dead, the empire is over and out. And the newly formed British Airways flies to Tokyo in just 15 hours…. on Boeing 707.
Despite the window design flaw and excessive number of cycles up to 40,000 feet and back, the Comet was surely one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built, along with the VC10. Somehow the British managed to produce very beautiful looking jet aircraft that one way or another were commercially disastrous or flawed in other ways.
Just 1 year later the Comet would be grounded and its Certificate of Airworthiness permanently revoked after half the fleet crashed or destroyed in accidents.
de Havilland wouldn't survive the failure of the Comet, they went tits-up in 58', seized by the Crown and placed under administrative receivership before its assets were sold off.
The same year Boeing's 707 entered service and completely revolutionized air travel and the aviation industry, skyrocketing the company into the largest aerospace manufacturer in the world
👍
Oh I just can't watch it because I know what became of the disastrous Comet. Much was learned from the Comet which paved the way for future aircraft, so it's not all bad.
Very interesting. At that time if you were student studying in England, you traveled by ship and it took one month. Airline tickets were too expensive. Later most people traveled over Russia by Aeroflot and Finnair. They also had to make several stops.
Saddly destination of the G-ALYP….
Beautiful aircraft the Concorde of its day
Well the UK did the work for the US and those deadly window designs, they learned to avoid the design, the Comets were very sinister because of those deadly accidents
Beautiful machine – I flew on Comets several times as a little boy with my parents, to eventually become a member of the supersonic age, travelling across the pond by Concorde a number of times, through the 90s and early 2,000s.
Only 8 years after ww2. Incredible
The RAF Nimrods flew until a few years ago with no problems
Incredible pioneers. Great Britains
Snake charmers?!!
A big could have been. Lessons learnt on this informed the better design of the BAE Hawker business jet.
1:56 沖縄の位置が間違ってる
And now its just a 13 or 14 hour flight between the two cities
For some reason, it's amazing that there are snake charmers in Karachi.
Love this channel. Although the majority of vids are from times way past mine, they give a sense of a much different (dare I say “more human and normal”) way of life 🥲.
I still love the design of the comet!
The Comet – a flawed triumph of brilliant British engineering. Wonderful film of great nostalgic interest.
That deadly plane😢