The Bristol Brabazon: Britain's White Elephant Airliner 

I've got a British Aviation book from 1946 that advertises the Brabazon as the shining future of air travel. The whole book is so full of optimism it's a little sad to see how quickly it all collapsed.

If you aren't watching this with subtitles on, you're missing out; it's amazing how many ways Brabazon can be spelled!

Wow,the Brabazon was a fancy airplane! I loved the Connie’s look. I love the Saab 12 seater. I have an affinity for turbo props and sea planes mostly.

I think the biggest mess up during the British Air ministry was when they didn't do the TSR

British engineering at it's finest... I owned a Jaguar XK-8 once, stunning to look at, but spent more time in the repair shop, then on the road, except when it was on a tow truck.

The development of the Bristol Proteus engine was also problematic, leading the chief of the design team to remark to superior, “You know, Stanley, when we designed the Proteus I decided we should make the engine with the lowest fuel consumption in the world, regardless of its weight and bulk. So far, we have achieved the weight and bulk!"

I always appreciate any information I can learn from aviation information. Thank you Simon! How IS your education to be a pilot going?A video of you training would be a fun reprieve for you.

Simon i love all your aviation stuff. How's the pilot's license going btw?

The immediate post-war period was probably the worst time possible to try to bend over backwards for the ultra rich and nobdoy else. With the explosion of the middle class on the backs of GI Bills and manufacturing job expansions there wasn't any other time in world history where more people wanted to tear down the barriers of every technology, activity and luxury, flight being one of the biggest.

Yet another super interesting video from Highlight History! Post WW2 era aircraft have always been semi fascinating to me, so to hear about a failed British attempt of a large luxury aircraft made for a great video. Thanks Gilles, Simon, Sam and Daniel!

Simon. When you state that each passenger had 8 sq m of space, you could have done a comparison to the number of passengers typically sit into the same space in a Ryan Air 373, etc.

Saunders Roe kept on making big things: they also made the SRN4 "Mountbatten"-Class Hovercrafts...

The fact that this aircraft was designed for the very well heeled makes me think the good old British class system helped to influence the design decisions. The British class system, the envy of pretty much no other democracies other than India and the USA.

B24 Commando (Air Ministry serial number AL504) was a very long-range Consolidated Liberator II aircraft adapted for passenger transport, to serve as the personal aircraft of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. On delivery Commando had a regular Liberator nose and tail configuration despite the internal modifications but was later converted to have a covered nose and also the same single tail fin used on the Consolidated PB4Y-2. The VIP ("Very Important Person[s]") interior had comfortable seating, an electric galley and even a bed, installed for Churchill. wiki

Love you Simon

My mum still uses two plates of Brabazon's skin as baking sheets

Good vid 👍

The Goon's Michael Bentine managed to get into the RAF (after the British had figured out what side Peru was on) in WW2, and much spoofed the likes of Brabazon, in both Aircraft design (getting more crazy with the BBC Sound Effects department) , and Committee operation, with Christmas Puddings designed by committee and so on.

Another channel! I thought war o graphics was the latest one. Turns out if you scroll through RU-vid enough you will always find another Simon channel.

I don't think the allied war effort was in a dire state by late 1942. The UK and USA were undefeatable after the battle of Midway and Germany had failed to secure the Caucasus oil fields. Axis defeat was inevitable and they were smart to think about the future peace.

Thanks

And the Comet was such a success

Contra rotating props is such a power move, I honestly wonder about this thing's fuel consumption next to comparable high bypass turbofan engine users...

The research and ground-breaking technology was second to none but the Government ordered a 'plane whose concept was that of pre-war thinking and when built, nobody wanted it, perhaps like the Short Shetland and Saro Princess flying boats. I saw the Brabazon on its publicised flight to London Airport in June (I think) 1950 and I remember the Princess 'boats for long laid up at calshot.

The UK sure has conceived and built some weird aircraft.

CASM, Cost per Available Seat Mile, is what drives airliner designed. Both the 747 and the A380 were supposed to have a piano bar….

Do you really have to use kilowatt instead of horsepower? I mean.. is it really necessary?

the Stratolaunch actually for the first time almost 3 years to the day, on April 13, 2019

Can we get a video on the Convaire?? Such a crazy but little known aircraft.

Closed captioning is having such an epic battle with the word "Brabazon." Keep trying caption-bot; you'll get there eventually!

Love this aircraft and the Princess from Sanders-Roe. I am disspointed I am to young too have seen either.

This man could read a phone book and I'm pretty sure it'd be interesting to listen to.

"9meter wide fuselage" I really doubt that, i have messured both on fotos and on the offical drawing and I get it to just over half of that, about 5 meter, pretty much the same as the boeing 767.. and it makes sense. 767-300 is 54 meters long, exacty the same as the brabizon. A380 IS 72 meters long, still "only" 7.2 meters wide. It still look far fatter tham the brabizon. So really, the 9 meter width is nonsens

"Winston Churchill was anxious to leave the country. It was July 1942, and he wanted to go to Cairo and Moscow to confer with his generals and with Soviet leader Josef Stalin, but the pilot assigned to fly him urged caution." Travels with Churchill Air & Space magazine page

drinking game: take a shot for every different spelling of "brabazon" in the auto captions.

De Havilland Drone - did it ever exist?

I guess not be harsh here, it's better to have prepared along a flawed vision than to have not prepared at all.

Least the Brabazon has round windows unlike the comet which has square windows.

Stratolaunch has flown a bunch of times.

Air powered hydraulics... NO MORE Questions.

Jeez, Simon! I am searching for game reviews so I can buy something to kill a few hours, and you're in the top five search results. I ALREADY SUBSCRIBE TO ALL YOUR CHANNELS! I'll catch with you after dinner.🙃 So many emojis. Emojis and #Shorts. Why is RU-vid so pathetically desperate?

It could be worse. It could be the Boeing 737 Max series jets. They were made by the hundreds before they were pulled from service and they sat for a long time. I will give you 1 eruo if you fly in one that has been off for over a year.

A plane that cost millions ends up being sold for scrap for a few thousand.😔

Hard to imagine the largest flying machine ever is a rocket.

"Before the war we had a number of debates on civil aviation. Those debates took place because there was in this House a large body of opinion that all was not well with civil aviation." Hansard CIVIL AVIATION HC Deb 17 December 1942 page

Is that the Castle theme song at the beginning?

Good video 👍

Can you do The Thunderbirds? Kidding...........

Actually, the Brabazon wasn’t a bad aircraft. It was on a similar scale to Convair’s B36 but with a much wider fuselage - a much better comparison could be drawn with Convair’s XC99, which suffered the same heroic fate as its British counterpart. The major problem faced by all very large aircraft of that era was the intractable issue of engine power. The Brabazon used coupled Centaurus engines while the XC99 used six of the enormously complicated Pratt and Whitney R4360 28 cylinder 3500 HP engines. These engines were certainly powerful but notoriously unreliable for civilian operation and (as we know now) were soon to be superseded by turboprop engines more than twice as powerful and infinitely more reliable in a few short years. What the Brabazon saga really teaches us is the folly of putting your faith in the government to produce anything worth having. And that applies to today as well as seventy years ago.

An object lesson for supporters of governmental solutions.

Simon, that last point might not be all that relevant considering the A380 was a commercial failure and with production being cancelled last year, has overall ended up losing Airbus money.

A small correction, at 5:26 you say the Stratolaunch hasn't been flown, but it actually was first flown in April 2019. Other than that, this was a great informative video.

DIfference between this and a Megaprojects video? This one is on a different channel

Good God...it works!

I'm sure the suit and poodle types of Luton, Hampstead Heath and Padbury would have looooved their 12 hour flights to NY on full sized Sofas and a walk up Cocktail bar A Cinema? 😅 With 8x 2500 turbo prop engines screaming away? 😂😂

OMG! It looks like one of Thunderbird 2's siblings! Lol

Wòooooooo Filton!

Imagine being tested and given a pilot's licence by someone who doesn't have one!

The megabirds seen to not catch on, not even for near 1000 passenger flight. As evident by the production end of the A380. To this day, we've not managed to make these behemoths of the sky economical to operate, and most A380s are now in the hands of private owners or airlines who are willing to run them at an (at times gigantic) loss, for bragging rights. Maybe there will come a day when we get there, but for now, the interests and priorities of the aviation world is evident by the Boeing 737 series and Airbus A320 series combined, make up ~60% of all non-military aircraft in the world currently operational. [Rant] But these projects are certainly not futile or straight losses. The vast majority of technology and innovations these and other venture projects generate, as with our space and public research programs, drive other sectors of industry and life forward in so many ways. And although many people think of grand projects significantly in abstract, and therefore some percieve them as imaginary burn pits where public (and commercial) funds get rolled in by the truckload, dumped and incinerated - truth is, usually 85-90% of the project costs are ultimately worker wages. Job creation. Mostly local, regional and national jobs directly for the projects, existing companies and new companies alike getting contract work. Thus hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people working good honest jobs that would not exist if not for that project. It's pretty much the same story with infrastructure projects, which frankly perplexes me at times how much people can be opposed to, even during periods of job shortages. Especially odd considering that the material fruits of all that labor directly benefits "everyone", not just a select few, commercial entities and areas of society most folks percieve as distant and abstract. And yes, some times projects are proposed or started, that do indeed cost extravagant amounts of money while benefitting only a few. Publicly funded, politician or special interest prestige and ego projects, with marginal public utility value. But those are few and far between in democratic societies, they usually do not get final approval, and the democratic consequences of (trying to) pull those projects off commonly lead to those driving them getting booted. But for those who _do_ go on, even then - the majority value is still the jobs it creates in actually developing and building it.

Quite interesting but let down by the glib presentation.

the dude at 2:30 looks a bit like bob odenkirk

Oh another channel from Simon subscribe😊

This feels like it could've been a failed Megaproject

What's the problem with development cost? It's only ~£600,000,000 in 2022 £s.

Lancaster bomber range: 2,530 mi (4,070 km, 2,200 nmi) wiki

"everything old is new again"...aint that the truth! theres even talk about airships coming back.

i guess, they will build it again in the UK now, because they get their empire back and can now show the world, that the UK is ahead of everyone, because unicorns can fly, too!

But when is my crush going to learn that bigger is not always better?

Avro Lancarstah 😆 lol

Say what you will, but the Brabazon just may be the best looking airliner ever built...ya gotta admit, it looks badass....

No need to serve the empire, we lost our way and leaned left and let our empire fall apart, we were once a titan but now we're a mouse.

Lol I wonder why it was too heavy

Lord brabazon is my relative….

Brabazon looks like "Q" (Star Trek not Bond)

Largest _passenger_ aircraft. Mriya is the biggest aircraft to take to the skies.

So pigs do fly?

How do you "RAISE" a town to the ground?? I can see "LEVELING" the town to the ground!! Cause at least leveling would flatten out the land!! Must be one of those "great" British sayings

STRANGE !! They didn't replace the props with jets. There still would have been the wealthy customers wanting quick travel to the beautiful places around the world.

Simon sez ……😮😅

womp womp

Ironically most of the A380s in operation were phased out in favour of Boings 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350 with all remaining A380s ordered cancelled. Both are so much cheaper to run with excellent range allowing point to point travel that they quickly made the A380 redundant. The A380 was never commercially viable and never made it investment back.

There was a advertising for the medicine calma life. They said they give me 10 euros for feedback. I said everytime u see there advertising I thin fuk my life

Airship or cruise ship luxury wasted

Typical government

G'day, The Bristol Brabazon the greatest failure of British Aviation...? Not really, olde Bean. Look up the Saunders Roe "Saro Princess"..., very nearly as big and heavy as the Brabazon, not many more Passengers, all First Class, of course ; Turboprop powered after initially being Radial Piston driven, and the whole thing had to both Fly and Float, because it was a Huge Flying Boat. They built 3, one of which flew ; never Commercially, nobody ever bought one so the 2nd and 3rd were not completed. All were eventually scrapped. As we used to sing, in Oz, in the 1960s, on Guy Fawkes Night, to the sound of Firecrackers....! "Rue, Brutannia, Marmalade and Jam (Prosperity for Britons, in Britain...!) Five Chinee Crackers Up your Arsehole (Gunpowder was invented in China...) Bang bang BangBang BANG !" Such is life. Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !

first

Hey, Simon.........ummmn - (....yea'eah.....I know, I know.......) just a 'tongue in cheek' jested moan - Filton.....is in Bristol, yeah....not Gloucestershire....!!

as airbus nobility, and someone who lives in blagnac, simon, please know it's said "bla nyac" not "blag-nac". i love your videos, and i know your pronunciation is awful as a meme, but still, that one hurt.

Is there a RU-vid upload about beards that look like pubic mounds hanging off of men's faces?

You talk to fast mate!

(As usual:) Talking much too quickly. ....Take your time ! Or stop presenting...

Im descended of Brabazons. They were not consistently smart or successful.

Jeez what a pompous irritating intro. Couldn’t bear to listen to him !

please stop making new channels. i'm hiding each one i see from my feed now

Do you really have to use kilowatt instead of horsepower? I mean.. is it really necessary?