The first jet a cadet ever flew

For almost four decades, from 1955 to 1993, a young RAF pilot’s first jet was very likely a Jet Provost. According to Flight International, it was the first ab initio jet trainer standardised by any air force: the idea was to put cadets straight into a jet instead of a propeller trainer. It was developed at Luton by Hunting Percival from the piston-engined Provost, and first flew on 26 June 1954. With later production under BAC, 734 were built.

From Percival to Hunting

Hunting was not a new company so much as a new name. Edgar Percival’s firm had joined the Hunting Group in 1944, and from 1947 it even designed and made internal components for Britain’s first atomic bomb, Blue Danube, with the High Explosive Research project at Fort Halstead. In 1954 it was renamed Hunting Percival Aircraft, and in 1957 simply Hunting Aircraft. Its Luton line also turned out the Pembroke military transport and its civil twin, the President.

Secrets and blown flaps

The Jet Provost sold abroad as well. Armed T51s went to Ceylon, Kuwait and Sudan, and two ex-Sudanese aircraft flew ground-attack missions for Nigeria against Biafra in the civil war of 1967. Hunting also won a 1959 Ministry of Aviation contract for a research aircraft to test jet flaps, in which engine exhaust was blown over the wing. The single H.126 flew on 26 March 1963 and made about a hundred test flights at RAE Bedford.

The airliner it never built

Hunting’s most important design was one it never built. The H.107 was a project for a 30-seat jet airliner. In 1960 the company was taken over by the new British Aircraft Corporation, itself formed that year from Bristol, English Electric and Vickers-Armstrongs, and BAC enlarged the H.107 into the One-Eleven. The Jet Provost became the BAC Jet Provost, and Hunting’s name left the aircraft industry.

מפעלים

• Luton works · Luton Airport, Bedfordshire

שיאים וראשונות

• Jet Provost: first ab initio jet trainer standardised by an air force, per Flight International