Originally Posted by bcrosier

I was only comparing the shape of the nose, I thought that was fairly self evident. Apparently not, but the poster after you picked right up on it.

I do know my history, enough to know that there were actually five Comet crashes prior to it's withdraw from service, four of which were fatal: Two runway overruns (Rome & Karachi) due to improper rotation, an in flight breakup due to failure of the horizontal stabilizer in a severe thunderstorm near Calcutta, and of course the two infamous inflight breakups near Rome and Naples due to metal fatigue.

And the Comet did usher in the the age of jet passenger travel, while due to the metal fatigue problem it was surpassed by the larger Boeing and Douglas products (as well as the VC-10), it was years ahead of them and was very popular and successful during it's initial operation. The Comet 4 was in use until the early 1980's, and the RAF version, the Nimrod was only recently retired.

The parallel between the Comet and the Concorde is interesting - they both were cutting edge airliners, both the first of their kind, neither achieved the commercial success their manufacturers would have hoped for, and they were considered the most prestigious way to travel (at least initially for the Comet.

For the record - I'm not really a rabid Comet fan, but I do think it had a very significant role in the development of commercial aviation, both in and of itself and in the accident investigation process. Incidentally, it is reputed that both Boeing and Douglas acknowledged that had the Comet not "paved the way" on the metal fatigue problem, they would likely have had the same issues.