BAC One-Eleven

The One-Eleven began at Hunting Aircraft in 1956 as the H.107, a thirty-seat jet for short routes. Hunting passed into the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960, and BAC reworked the design the following year into an eighty-seat airliner with two Rolls-Royce Speys at the tail and a T-tail, the layout the Caravelle had introduced. British United Airways placed the launch order for ten on 9 May 1961, Braniff of Texas followed that autumn, and in July 1963 American Airlines ordered fifteen, the first of thirty: the One-Eleven was the short-haul jet Britain sold to America. The prototype, G-ASHG, flew from Hurn on 20 August 1963 and was lost on 22 October during stall tests near Chicklade in Wiltshire, when the tailplane sat in the wake of the stalled wing and could not push the nose down. Mike Lithgow and his six companions were killed. The deep stall became the textbook lesson for every T-tailed jet, and the One-Eleven went into service with stick shakers, stick pushers and a redesigned wing leading edge.

The aircraft was built to turn round at small airfields without help: a two-pilot cockpit, an auxiliary power unit for starting and air conditioning, a forward airstair built into the port door and a second stair that dropped from under the tail. BUA began services from Gatwick to Genoa on 9 April 1965, Braniff and Mohawk followed in the United States the same spring, and the Series 300 and 400 added fuel and weight for the longer American sectors. The Series 500, launched for BEA in 1967, stretched the fuselage by thirteen and a half feet and the span by five, added the 12,550 lb Spey 512 and seated up to 119. BEA’s eighteen 510EDs were given cockpits laid out like the Trident’s so that crews could move between the two types, and they entered service on the domestic and European routes at the end of 1968.

The hot-and-high Series 475 of 1970 married the shorter fuselage to the 500’s wing and engines, but sales slowed as the 737 and DC-9 grew, and British production ended at Hurn in 1984 after 235 aircraft. Nine more were built under licence in Romania as the Rombac 1-11 between 1982 and 1989, for a total of 244. British Airways withdrew its last One-Elevens from scheduled service in 1992, Dan-Air and European Aviation carried on in the United Kingdom until noise rules caught up with the Spey, and the last civil operations in Europe ended in 2003. Two flew on at Boscombe Down as radar trials aircraft until December 2012, and the last airworthy One-Eleven, Northrop Grumman’s radar testbed in the United States, was retired on 7 May 2019.