On 20 August 1963 a small, sharp-nosed jet in British United Airways colours lifted off from Hurn, near Bournemouth. It had two Rolls-Royce engines bolted to the back of the fuselage, a tailplane perched on top of the fin, and a head start that its American rival would never quite claw back.

The BAC One-Eleven flew 18 months before the Douglas DC-9 and carried fare-paying passengers eight months before it. It won orders from American Airlines and Braniff, a rare British breakthrough in the US airline market. Then, nine weeks after that first flight, the prototype fell out of the sky over Wiltshire and taught the whole industry a new and frightening phrase: deep stall.

This is the story of Britain's most successful short-haul jet of its era, from a 30-seat sketch at a Luton trainer factory to a licence-built airliner in Ceaușescu's Romania. It belongs on the same shelf as the Caravelle that pioneered its layout and the Trident that shared its engines.

From a 30-seat sketch to an 80-seat jet

The One-Eleven began at Hunting Aircraft, the Luton firm that built the Jet Provost trainer. In the late 1950s Hunting drew up the H.107, a 30-seat jet meant to replace propeller airliners such as the Vickers Viscount on short routes.

In 1960 the British government pushed Hunting, Vickers-Armstrongs, Bristol and English Electric together into the British Aircraft Corporation. BAC liked the idea but not the size. The design grew into the 59-seat BAC 107, and when market research said that was still too small, it grew again to around 80 seats. The planned Bristol Siddeley engines were dropped for Rolls-Royce Speys, and the BAC 111 was born.

Crucially, it was not built to suit a British state airline. BAC designed it for airlines around the world and expected to sell as many as 400. British United Airways placed the launch order for ten on 9 May 1961, and on 20 October that year Braniff International Airways of Dallas ordered six.

Mentour Now! explains the engineering of the BAC One-Eleven and why it changed short-haul flying.

Beating Douglas across the Atlantic

The prototype, G-ASHG, rolled out at Hurn on 28 July 1963 and flew on 20 August, painted in British United livery. Douglas would not fly its DC-9 until 25 February 1965. In the jet age, that was an eternity.

The head start mattered because Washington was not keen on foreign airliners. The US Civil Aeronautics Board stopped Bonanza Air Lines from buying One-Elevens and blocked Frontier and Ozark too, while letting them buy American jets. Bonanza ended up flying the DC-9. Having orders on the books before Douglas had anything to offer was the One-Eleven's best protection.

The biggest prize came on 17 July 1963, a month before the first flight, when American Airlines ordered 15 One-Elevens with options on 15 more. It was the first time American had bought a foreign aircraft type for its fleet.

22 October 1963

Nine weeks into the test programme, G-ASHG took off from Wisley in Surrey with seven men on board. In command was Lieutenant Commander Mike Lithgow OBE, BAC's chief test pilot. He was a former Fleet Air Arm pilot who had set a world air speed record in a Supermarine Swift in 1953.

The job that morning was stall testing: slowing the jet until the wing stopped lifting, then checking how it recovered, with the centre of gravity in different positions. On the fifth stall of the flight, at around 16,000 feet with 8 degrees of flap, the One-Eleven did not recover. It came down almost level, sinking fast with very little forward speed, and hit the ground at Cratt Hill near Chicklade in Wiltshire, 23 minutes after take-off.

All seven died: Lithgow, test pilot Captain R. Rymer, aerodynamicist B. J. Prior, designer C. J. Webb, senior observer R. A. F. Wright and observers G. R. Poulter and D. J. Clark. The official accident report came to a stark conclusion.

Deep stall and the stick pusher

What had happened was new. With the engines and tailplane mounted high at the back, the One-Eleven's tail sat directly behind the wing. At a very high angle of attack, the disturbed air coming off the stalled wing and the engine nacelles blanketed the tailplane. The elevators stopped working, so the pilots could not push the nose down to recover.

A similar locked-in stall had already caught a Gloster Javelin prototype in 1953, but G-ASHG gave it a name. BAC's answer has protected airliners ever since. It fitted a stick shaker to warn the pilots, a stick pusher that shoves the control column forward before the wing stalls, and a reshaped wing leading edge that smoothed the airflow towards the engines and tail.

Customers did not flinch. Two months after the crash, newsreel cameras filmed test pilot Jock Bryce running a new, modified One-Eleven down the runway ready for its first flight. In February 1964 American and Braniff took up their options and ordered more.

The lesson travelled well beyond Weybridge. Rear-engined T-tail jets such as the DC-9 and Boeing 727 were the coming fashion, and the stick pusher became a common feature on most of them. In October 2013 a stone memorial was unveiled at Cratt Hill. It lists the seven men and carries a line from Coleridge: “...and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them and is their appointed rest and their native country.”

British Movietone, December 1963: two months after the crash, Jock Bryce prepares a modified One-Eleven for flight.

Into service, and into America

British United received the first production aircraft, G-ASJI, on 22 January 1965 and flew the first revenue service, Gatwick to Genoa, on 9 April. The DC-9 did not enter service with Delta until 8 December 1965. BAC had won the race to market by eight months.

Braniff took its first One-Eleven on 11 March 1965. Mohawk Airlines, a regional carrier in New York State, put its first into service on 25 June and became the first US regional airline to fly jets on short routes. Aloha later chose it as its first jet for inter-island flying in Hawaii.

British Movietone footage of the One-Eleven inaugural flight on 9 April 1965, with the aircraft in British United markings.

American flew its first scheduled One-Eleven service, New York LaGuardia to Toronto, on 6 March 1966. It called them "400 Astrojets" and eventually ran 30 of them across the north-east, at their peak flying about 230 sectors a day to 21 destinations.

The love affair did not last. American retired its last One-Eleven in January 1972, less than six years after the first entered service, and replaced it with the Boeing 727. The airline's biographer was blunt about why.

A stretch that came a year too late

BAC's answer to growing traffic was the Series 500, stretched to 119 seats, with a longer wing and more powerful Speys. It first flew on 30 June 1967, but launch customer British European Airways had taken a year deciding what it wanted. That year let the DC-9 and the new Boeing 737 catch up in the United States, and the 500 never sold there.

In Europe it was a different story. The 500 became a charter workhorse with British Caledonian, Dan-Air and many others, and BEA's own 510ED version had a cockpit modified to match the Trident. British Airways kept the type in regular service until October 1992.

Under every One-Eleven sat the Spey. Rolls-Royce sized it for the new generation of short-haul jets, and it entered service in 1964 on both the One-Eleven and the Trident. A militarised version powered the Boucanier de Blackburn S.2, and a joint Rolls-Royce and Allison derivative, the TF41, went into the A-7 Corsair II.

Air forces bought One-Elevens too. The Force aérienne royale australienne took two Series 217s with a navigator's station and a sextant hatch in the cockpit roof. The Brazilian Air Force flew a One-Eleven as a VIP transport under the designation VC-92, known as Brazilian Air Force One.

Bucharest's One-Elevens

By the mid-1970s orders had slowed to a trickle and the British line was kept alive largely by Romania. On 9 June 1979 Nicolae Ceaușescu signed a contract for licence production in Bucharest. The plan covered at least 22 aircraft built at Romaero, Speys made under licence by Turbomecanica, and hopes of selling up to 80 to China and other developing markets.

The first Rombac One-Eleven, YR-BRA, flew on 18 September 1982. The money and parts never flowed as planned. Only nine were finished before production stopped in 1989, and two more were abandoned on the line. Together with the 235 built in Britain, where production ended in 1984, that made 244 One-Elevens in all.

The long goodbye

One-Elevens flew on for decades with charter airlines, start-ups and, later, operators in Africa and Asia. One British Airways example became famous in 1990 when its windscreen blew out at altitude, a story Afterburner has told in full in Le capitaine qui a été aspiré hors de son propre cockpit.

Noise finished the job that the DC-9 and 737 had started. The loud Speys struggled with tougher European noise rules, and in 2010 the European Aviation Safety Agency revoked the type certificate at Airbus's request. There was irony in that: BAC's own planned successor, the X-Eleven, had been dropped when British Aerospace joined Airbus, and the European design that won instead became the A320.

The final flight came on 6 May 2019, when Northrop Grumman retired N164W, a former American Series 401AK used as an avionics testbed, including for the F-35 programme. It made a low pass over Baltimore/Washington airport and landed for the last time, 56 years after G-ASHG first showed the Americans how short-haul jets would look.

Sources: Wikipedia (BAC One-Eleven, 1963 BAC One-Eleven test crash, Mike Lithgow, Rolls-Royce Spey, Stall (fluid dynamics), McDonnell Douglas DC-9), BAE Systems Heritage, Aviation Safety Network, FLYING Magazine, Metropolitan Airport News, Airport Spotting, World Airline News, British Movietone