de Havilland DH.88 Comet
The de Havilland DH.88 Comet is a British two-seat racing monoplane built by the de Havilland Aircraft Company for the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia. Only five were built. The privately entered G-ACSS Grosvenor House won the race in under 71 hours, and Comets went on to set long-distance records and to be evaluated by governments as mail planes. Two survive: Grosvenor House, flown by the Shuttleworth Collection until it was damaged in an August 2026 incident, and Black Magic, under restoration.
Why It Mattered
The DH.88 Comet was designed for one event: the MacRobertson Air Race from Mildenhall in England to Melbourne in Australia, staged to mark the centenary of the foundation of the State of Victoria. Sir MacPherson Robertson, the Australian industrialist who sponsored the race, put up its gold cup and prize money. De Havilland treated the entry as both a prestige project and a chance to develop modern high-speed techniques. The red Comet Grosvenor House, flown by C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black, won the speed prize in 70 hours and 54 minutes, and no other aircraft in the race matched its time.
Design Notes
Arthur Hagg designed the Comet as a two-seat, twin-engined cantilever monoplane. In a single airframe de Havilland combined stressed-skin construction, retractable undercarriage, landing flaps, variable-pitch propellers and an enclosed cockpit. Because its thin wing could not hold spars deep enough to carry the flight loads, the skin itself was stressed, built up from spruce planking laid diagonally over box spars. Two race-tuned Gipsy Six engines, uprated from de Havilland's new production engine, drove two-position propellers. Three fuselage tanks carried the fuel for the long race stages, with the two crew seated in tandem in a cockpit set aft of the wing.
Operational History
The first Comet flew on 8 September 1934, six weeks before the race it was built for. Three Comets were built for the race and sold to private owners at the discounted price of £5,000 each. Twenty aircraft left Mildenhall at dawn on 20 October 1934, the three Comets among them. Scott and Campbell Black reached Allahabad to find they had overtaken the Mollisons, who had led in Black Magic, and they pressed on through a storm over the Bay of Bengal and an engine problem over the Timor Sea. They crossed the finish line at Flemington Racecourse on 23 October, in an official time of 70 hours, 54 minutes and 18 seconds. G-ACSR was the fourth aircraft to reach Melbourne, in 108 hours 13 minutes, and its crew then flew it back to England, setting a round-trip record of 13 days, 6 hours and 43 minutes. Two more Comets were built after the race, and three of the five were bought and evaluated by national governments, typically as mail planes.
Afterlife
Grosvenor House was taken on by the RAF as K5084, suffered accidents in service and was sold as scrap. Rescued and restored at Essex Aero, it raced again as The Orphan, finishing fourth in the 1937 England–Damascus race, and as The Burberry it set out-and-back records to the Cape and to New Zealand, the New Zealand return taking ten days, twenty-one hours and twenty-two minutes. Stored through the Second World War, it was statically restored for display in 1951 and given to the Shuttleworth Collection in 1965. Restoration to flying condition, begun at RAE Farnborough and finished at Hatfield, returned it to the air in May 1987, and after an undercarriage failure in 2002 and approved structural modifications it flew again in August 2014. The other survivor, Black Magic, was rediscovered in Portugal after more than forty years lost and is under restoration. In August 2026 Grosvenor House was damaged in a landing incident at the Flying Proms air show, and the Shuttleworth Trust has launched a £250,000 appeal to return it to flight.