Handley Page HP.42
The Handley Page HP.42 was a four-engine biplane airliner built by Handley Page for Imperial Airways, entering service in 1931. This record covers the family as the sources frame it: the long-range Eastern HP.42 and the shorter-range, higher-capacity Western HP.45. Eight aircraft were built, four of each variant, and their two Pullman-style cabins made them the airline's land-based flagships. In nine years of civilian service the fleet flew more than ten million miles without a fatality, a record scoped to civilian service: one aircraft burned in a hangar fire in 1937, and the seven that reached the war were all destroyed by the end of 1940, the last condemned airframe being scrapped in 1941. None survives.
Why It Mattered
In 1928 Imperial Airways went looking for a large airliner for its long-distance routes, and Handley Page answered with two largely similar machines: the HP42 for the long-range Eastern routes and the HP45 for shorter European ones. When the type entered service in 1931, Wikipedia describes the pair as the largest airliners then in regular use anywhere in the world. Through most of the 1930s the eight aircraft formed the backbone of the airline's land-based fleet. They flew in a style set by the railway age — two separate cabins fitted out in Pullman fashion — for passengers drawn, given the fares, mostly from high society. Their reputation rested on safety: across nine years of civilian service and more than ten million miles, the fleet recorded no fatality.
Design Notes
The HP42 was a large unequal-span biplane — strictly, a sesquiplane — with an all-metal frame and fabric covering over the wings, tail and rear fuselage. Four Bristol Jupiter radials powered it: 490-horsepower XIFs in the Eastern model, and supercharged XFBMs of 555 horsepower in the Western. Imperial Airways demanded an airliner that could land slowly and safely on the grass fields of the day, specifying a stall speed no higher than 52 mph; the answer was a very large wing and automatic leading-edge slots, and a cruise of only about 100 mph. Passengers rode in two cabins, one ahead of the wings and one behind them, styled after Pullman railway carriages with wide windows and full onboard service. The Eastern cabin seated six, later twelve, forward and twelve aft, with substantial baggage space; the Western layout traded baggage for seats, eighteen forward and twenty aft.
Operational History
The prototype, named Hannibal, made the type's first flight on 14 November 1930, flown by Squadron Leader Thomas Harold England. Its certificate of airworthiness followed in May 1931, and on 11 June 1931 the first fare-paying passengers were carried to Paris. The fleet then settled into Imperial Airways' Eastern and European services; the Western aircraft Heracles, working the Paris, Cologne and Zürich routes, passed one million miles on 23 July 1937. In May 1932 an HP42 carried tourists from Croydon to Basle on the first charter flight holiday; the Polytechnic Touring Association, which organised it, handled over 900 tourists by the end of that year. The safety record was not built on an absence of accidents: in August 1931 Hannibal survived a forced landing in Kent after an engine failure, with no major injuries among the twenty passengers and crew, and was rebuilt. One aircraft was lost before the war: Hengist, by then converted to an Eastern aircraft, burned in an airship hangar fire at Karachi on 31 May 1937. When the surviving aircraft were impressed for war service in September 1939, the fleet had flown more than ten million miles for the airline and had recorded, as Wikipedia scopes it, almost a decade without a fatality in civilian service.
Afterlife
Impressment ended the type rather than extending it: the survivors went to the Royal Air Force, most of them to No. 271 Squadron. Horatius was destroyed first, in a forced landing at Tiverton Golf Course in Devon in November 1939. Hannibal disappeared over the Gulf of Oman on 1 March 1940 with eight people aboard, and no trace of it has ever been discovered. On 19 March 1940 a gale at Whitchurch wrecked Hanno and Heracles together; Horsa burned after a forced landing near Whitehaven that August, and Hadrian was torn from its moorings at Doncaster in December and left inverted on a railway line. Helena lasted longest: grounded after a hard landing in 1940, she was condemned for corrosion and scrapped in 1941, though her front fuselage section spent several more years as a Royal Navy office. No complete HP42 or HP45 survives today; the type's afterlife is in photographs, film appearances and, since a fundraising campaign launched in 2015, efforts to build a replica from the original blueprints.