Keith Hayward takes us along the corridors of Whitehall and into aero industry boardrooms to chronicle the false dawns and missed opportunities of the first thirty-three years after World War II. Starting with the Brabazon recommendations, he illustrates the competing interests of politicians, the aircraft industry and the airlines by examining project such as de Havilland’s Comet and Trident, the Vickers VC10 and the Airbus programme. The story ends when he reaches the “vale of tears in the early 1970s”, from which, in the end, the British aviation industry came up “reasonably happy”.

Prof Hayward told his “sad stories of the death of aeroplanes” to the Royal Aeronautical Society's Historical Group Lecture on 17th October 2002. The podcast was edited by Mike Stanberry FRAeS and it was digitised thanks to a grant from the Royal Aeronautical Society Foundation.