DH-88 Comet

About

The de Havilland DH.88 Comet was developed specifically to compete in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race, a marathon competition from Mildenhall, England, to Melbourne, Australia, scheduled to start on October 20, 1934, to mark the centenary of the State of Victoria. De Havilland's design team produced an aircraft that was the first British airframe to combine, in one design, every element of what would become the modern high-speed aircraft: stressed-skin construction, cantilever monoplane flying surfaces, retractable undercarriage, landing flaps, variable-pitch propellers, and an enclosed cockpit. Three Comets were built, each painted in a distinctive racing livery — Grosvenor House in red, Black Magic in black, and Bermuda Pride in green.

The race itself became a defining moment in interwar British aviation. Grosvenor House (registration G-ACSS), flown by C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black, reached Melbourne in first place after just 70 hours and 54 minutes — a result that put the Comet on the front page of every British newspaper and established de Havilland's reputation for clean aerodynamic design that would carry through to the wartime Mosquito and the postwar Comet jet airliner. The black-painted Black Magic, flown by James and Amy Mollison, retired from the race in India after a piston seized following the use of contaminated fuel sourced from a local bus company at Jabalpur. Only five DH.88 Comets were ever built, but the design's influence on de Havilland's later work was profound.

The unmistakable Comet silhouette — twin-engine, low-wing, slim and aerodynamically clean — is one of the more romantic scale subjects in modern RC modeling. Sport-scale and giant-scale Comet kits appear at fly-ins where the Golden Age of air racing remains a beloved theme.

In the simulator

A demanding twin-engine scale subject. The DH.88 Comet in our sim has the kind of slim-profile, high-speed character that defined the real racer — narrow wings, deliberate roll authority, and approach speeds that demand respect. Use it for sport-scale flying with the classic 1930s racer aesthetic, low passes down a grass strip, and the long-cross-country profile the type was designed for. Pairs well with grass-strip and golden-age field landscapes. A natural sibling to the Brown-B1 Racer (CV Planes Pack 1) and Chester Jeep in this pack.