Historic 1934 race-winning DH.88 Comet badly damaged at Shuttleworth

The de Havilland DH.88 Comet G-ACSS “Grosvenor House”, the aircraft that won the 1934 MacRobertson England to Australia air race, overturned on landing at Old Warden aerodrome in Bedfordshire, United Kingdom, on August 15, 2026, sustaining extensive damage.

The Shuttleworth Trust said the accident happened at approximately 19:20 local time during its Flying Proms air show, with one crew member on board. Emergency services extracted the pilot, who was responding at the scene and was taken to hospital for assessment. Nobody else was hurt. Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service sent crews from Sandy and Kempston to support the on-site fire service.

The UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which has investigated several recent accidents involving historic aircraft in the UK, had not commented at the time of writing.

The only airworthy DH.88, and the MacRobertson winner

De Havilland built five DH.88s, three of them for the 1934 race. Two survive. G-ACSP “Black Magic” has spent years under restoration, which leaves G-ACSS as the only airworthy example and the only one that actually won.

Flown by Charles W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black, G-ACSS covered the Mildenhall to Melbourne course in 70 hours and 54 minutes. It was the first British aircraft to combine stressed-skin construction, a cantilever wing, retractable undercarriage, flaps, variable-pitch propellers and an enclosed cockpit in a single airframe, the design vocabulary de Havilland later carried into the Mosquito.

The airframe has been rebuilt repeatedly since. Written off in Royal Air Force hands as K5084 and sold for scrap, it was rebuilt by Essex Aero, raced as “The Orphan” and set records as “The Burberry” before reaching the Shuttleworth Collection in 1965.

A landing accident already grounded it for 12 years

Restored with support from about 50 organizations, G-ACSS flew again on May 17, 1987, from Hatfield. That airfield closed in 1994 and the Comet went back to Old Warden by road, where the runway was initially too short to operate it. On October 28, 2002, after a test flight for its permit renewal, its undercarriage failed on landing. Investigators found that the legs as originally designed were liable to fail under certain conditions, and a modified structure had to be approved by the UK Civil Aviation Authority. The aircraft did not fly again until August 1, 2014.

Shuttleworth has not said whether the damage is repairable. Operators of historic fleets typically suspend flying until a cause is established, as the Royal Air Force did with its Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Spitfires and Hurricanes. It is the second accident at Old Warden since May 30, 2026, when an Avro Triplane IV replica came down during the Wings and Wheels air show.The post Historic 1934 race-winning DH.88 Comet badly damaged at Shuttleworth appeared first on AeroTime.

Go to Source