de Havilland Comet — Square Windows That Fatigue-Cracked the First Jetliner Out of the Sky

On 10 January 1954, twenty minutes out of Rome and climbing through roughly 27,000 feet, BOAC Comet G-ALYP — the world’s first jet airliner in scheduled service — broke apart over the Tyrrhenian Sea near Elba; all 35 aboard died. Eighty-nine days later, on 8 April 1954, after the type had been cleared back to service, South African Airways’ Comet 1 G-ALYY disintegrated in almost identical circumstances while climbing through about 35,000 feet near Naples, killing all 21. Fifty-six people died in the two events. The cause was neither weather, sabotage, nor the engines the press first blamed: it was high-cycle fatigue — a crack that grew, pressurization cycle after pressurization cycle, from the corner of a cutout in the cabin skin until the fuselage unzipped at altitude.

The mechanism was proven by experiment. The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough sealed a sister airframe, G-ALYU, inside a purpose-built water tank and repeatedly cycled the cabin from flight pressure and back. On 24 June 1954, after 3,057 simulated flights, the fuselage burst, the fatigue crack starting at the corner of a window cutout exactly as the recovered Elba wreckage would confirm.

The popular memory fixed on the square passenger windows, and that shorthand is half right and half myth. The cabin windows were indeed unforgiving rectangles whose corners concentrated stress, but the fatal crack on the tested airframe and on G-ALYP began at the rivet-pierced corner of a different opening — the aperture for the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) antenna on the upper fuselage. The skin was thin, the corners sharp, and the holes around them punch-riveted rather than drilled, leaving microscopic cracks before the aircraft ever flew. The result was a stress concentration far higher than de Havilland’s calculations admitted, in a structure cycled to full pressure on every flight, with no full-scale fatigue test to expose it first. The Court of Inquiry under Lord Cohen and the RAE’s analysis turned the Comet from a national triumph into the founding case study of aircraft fatigue: Britain’s airworthiness code was rewritten to demand full-pressure-cabin fatigue testing, the Comet was redesigned with oval windows and thicker skin, and the discipline of damage tolerance grew from the wreckage off Elba.