How did De Havilland financially survive the Comet 1 disasters ?
Recent issues with the Boeing 787 sometimes leads to a discussion of the financial impact on the business.
Makes you wonder how De Havilland managed to survive financially the Comet issues. Were the purchasers compensated in any way or was it just too bad ? What about all the costs associated with the production of the part-built Comet 2 and 3s that you can see pictures of in the assembly plants, which were later scrapped. The loss of years of revenues for all the forthcoming orders. The costs of all the Farnborough tests which must have consumed huge amounts of De Havilland staff time. The low numbers of Comet 4 orders must mean it did little more than cover its own costs.
I've also sometimes wondered why they just carried on with the same name into the Comet 4 production. Given the huge bad publicity (for what was essentially an aircraft designer's fault), why they didn't go for a different name.