Yes, in fact I think that Boeing and perhaps others were actually quite forthright about the learnings from the Comet. The British got all the pain and the Americans got all the profits. Not blaming anyone, but that’s just how it turned out.
Something similar happened in Canada with the Avro Arrow. Not that it had problems, but from the fact that it was unceremoniously canceled by a short-sighted government.
Agree with your whole post. In the US, nowadays base fares are lower, and discounted fares are a LOT lower than pre-deregulation, or even early post-deregulation (1978). Canada has enjoyed only a pale shadow of that same effect due to smaller market size, fewer airlines, etc.
By far the worst time/place to buy a ticket is at the counter shortly before departure. Those are the “We know you’re screwed buddy, so bend over; the Captain has a yacht err boat um alimony payment to make!” 
But 6 hours previously when the airline is trying to fill an under-full plane, tickets are going for chicken feed. The magic moment when the super-sale ends and the screw-you sale begins is another thing powered by Rudy the Fare Chicken. Or his AI successor.
Not to get too far off topic, but I will never begrudge the salaries of flight crew. Junior folks flying small commuter airlines make pitiful salaries (something that was cited as a factor in Colgan Air Flight 3407) because apparently management has figured out that they really love flying and so they can be screwed on money. Senior air crew who make decent money have bloody well earned it, IMO.
Ah no I’m not sure of that now, I think I’ve conflated two related, but separate, developments and also given the odd internet factoid more credence than it deserves.
I had meant the concept rather than design, but doing a bit of research I see that isn’t right either.
The concept of a two engined jet had preceded the design of the BAe 146, but it doesn’t appear that they were as closely related as I thought. The design team did progress from working on a twin jet to working on the 146, but the two concepts seem quite different. BAE 146
In the early 1960s, the de Havilland aircraft company of Britain was working on the design of a small, twin turboprop, high-wing feederliner designated the “DH.123”. De Havilland was then absorbed into the Hawker Siddeley Aviation company, with the concept mutating to a low-wing aircraft with twin turbofans mounted on the rear fuselage, designated the “HS.144”. That concept didn’t go anywhere either, mostly because of the lack of an adequate powerplant, and in early 1971 the design team decided to adopt a high-wing configuration with four small turbofans, focusing on the new US Avco Lycoming ALF 502 engine. The four-engine design was given the designation of “HS.146”, and seemed promising enough to lead to a formal development program start on 29 August 1973, with the British government backing the program.
My copy of the operating manual has this to say:
Four engines yield exceptional short-field performance. The one engine inoperative ceiling is also considerably higher than that of a twin. Four engines also give inherently larger take off handling safety margins. The aircraft may be ferried with one engine inoperative.
The last point is a definite show stopper for a twin, you can’t ferry a twin with an engine out. The rest of the points are fair, but not necessarily decisive.
It’s not a very secure job either, as both @LSLGuy and I have found at some point in our careers.
After a couple of flights back and forth between W Africa and England my mother considered herself as an experienced flyer (as did we children) “Flying is soo boring.”
As a consequence, she would always stock up with boiled sweets (for the pressure) and colouring books to keep the little ones entertained. No iPods or in-flight entertainment back then.
Getting from Lungi airport to Freetown involves a boat trip across the harbour. Back then, it was in a smallish motor launch. On one trip, I was sat at the side dangling a hand in the water, when one of the crew suddenly grabbed me and practically threw me into the middle of the boat.
Mother was horrified - Big Black man manhandles precious son - until he pointed out that we were sailing through a whole raft of Portuguese Men of War -a very nasty species of jellyfish.
Another slight diversion into the background: after WW2 the UK government hedged its bets on trying to encourage the aviation construction industry, with (for the time) substantial (and much criticised) sums of money going into several different lines of development, depending on whether the future lay with speed, capacity or luxury. So as well as the Comet there was the Bristol Brabazon and the Princess flying boat (which I remember seeing at its last storage mooring on the Isle of Wight in the mid-50s).
First flight was with Lufthansa in 1964 NY->Frankfurt->Gander-NY, with Gander being a fuel stop. I was 4 1/2.
I remember being frisked by security in either 1969 or 1972, out of the sight of my parents (and everyone else) after a rash of hijackings.
My Dad worked for Pan Am from 1967 onwards and whenever we travelled we always HAD to wear a suit or some other dress up fashion. No jeans, sneakers, flip-flops. To this day I can’t help but dress smartly and regrettably look down on slobby/casually dressed passengers. I still think of it as state of the art travel and treat it with a form of reverence
That said I am a poor traveler (not quite acrophobic but very uncomfortable in planes). One trip, aware of the poor track record of Lockheed 1011’s, I was unhappy to see one at the gate of my honeymoon flight to Bermuda. I kept my mouth shut as to not disturb my wife when this other passenger (a woman) walked up to the gate, saw the plane and proclaimed loudly “Oh God, an L1011, we’re gonna die!” It actually made me laugh hearing that said out loud. Flight was uneventful.
My first solo flight was on a DC-3 in 1968. My parents and I (skinny teenager) went to Andros Island in the Bahamas for a week of diving. Getting there was quite the adventure. Fortunately mom didn’t recognize the single-engine plane we got on as a real plane until it took off. She wasn’t happy. 
I had such a good time that my parents negotiated a deal with the lodge owner to let me stay another week. But that meant that I had to fly back to DC on my own. The flight from Andros to Nassau was on a DC-3. Short flight but interesting. I seem to remember some questions about getting back into the US as I had left as an accompanied child and came back on my own. No passports of course. But I just stood there and let the agents figure out how to make their lives simpler and I was sent on my way.
In the 70s, you just find a good travel agent who gets a price from A to B, then fly any routing or dayou want, provided you don’t go backwards. I bought a one-way Johannesburg to Gander, and stopped at Libreville, Douala, Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Monrovia, Madrid, London, Glasgow and Dublin. Book reservations at any walk=in agent a couple days before.
Block fares meant Canada to anywhere in UK/Spain/Portugal for the same price, regardless if there is a direct flight. So I flew Gander-London-Lisbon-Funchal-Las Palmas, for about $100 and in those days there were 3 hops a week from there to Nouadhibou, Mauritania. Then the back of a truck to Dakar.
My first flight was in 1953, flying from my parents’ home town of Moncton, New Brunswick to my father’s new duty station in Gander, Newfoundland (he was an Air Traffic Controller and Gander was then the western hub of trans-Atlantic air travel). We flew as dependents deadheading on a Department of Transport aircraft (probably a Lockheed 10), and I remember nothing, being only 2 months old at the time. We flew back and forth a couple of times over the next few years, of which I remember little as I was too young. I do remember a short flight on a DHC Beaver from the Deadman’s Pond float-plane base near the airport - probably piloted by a friend of my father.
I do know that, at the age of 5, I could reliably identify most of the airplanes passing overhead by the sound of their engines. Still almost all piston-powered at the time.One exception was the brand-new TU-114 airliner version of the TU-95 bomber, with its 4 huge turboprops, which landed in Gander to refuel on route to the US with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. My mother was the local CBC correspondent and was allowed out to the plane to interview the Russian Premier on the tarmac, with my father tagging along with his camera as her “official photographer”. I still have the photos he took.
I didn’t fly again until I was 25, with a flight to the UK for the science fiction WorldCon, on an Air Canada Boeing 747, which shut down an engine about 2 hours before the end of the flight.
1971 - I was 17 and working part-time as a flunky for my dad. He was VP for the foreign freight forwarding department of an import/export company. There was some customs paperwork that needed to be signed for a shipment to go the next day (I think.) We were in Baltimore and the customer was in Minneapolis, so they arranged for me to fly the papers out there, get them signed, and return that afternoon. Because of intermediate stops both ways, I experienced 5 takeoffs and landings on my first day flying commercial. It was exhausting. At least I didn’t have to deal with TSA back then.
As an aside, the man whose signature I needed had his secretary take me to lunch while I was there. At the restaurant, she asked if I wanted a drink, and she was surprised when I told her my age - she thought I was at least in my 20s. Funny what professional attire can do for a person!
During 1941 I spent the summer with different relatives in California, Texas and Kansas. The first leg from Seattle to San Diego was in a Boeing 247. Before boarding they weighed everything including me. Passengers were seated to meet the CG requirements of the aircraft. About all I recall of the flight was the attractive uniformed stewardess handing out chewing gum at take off and the airplane constantly yawing slightly right and left as the engines synchronized.
One leg of the return flight was memorable because somewhere between Denver and Seattle the plane landed and took on a load of military personnel. More than the number of seats available, They stood in the aisles and gripped hanging straps for that flight segment. Just like on a bus.
A kid on a plane was newsworthy 80 years ago so it made the front page of the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
(hmmmm…SDMB won’t display .jpg - must have lost my touch)
I figured it out -
