Bristol Britannia
Following the war, Bristol found new business by entering a new field — airliners. The company built an enormous eight-engine prototype, the Bristol Brabazon, then drew on this experience by producing the more practical four-engine Britannia. The Britannia used turboprop engines, which combined a jet engine with a propeller. It was faster than its propeller-driven competitors and had longer range. During the 1950s, airlines often tried to fly nonstop westward across the Atlantic from London or Paris to New York but found that their planes had to stop en route to refuel in Newfoundland. This happened when there were strong headwinds that blew from the west. But the Britannia became the first airliner to offer such nonstop service reliably. In December 1958 Canadian Pacific Airlines introduced its Bristol Britannia jet-prop aircraft for service between Vancouver, B.C. and Australia, via Hawaii.
The in-flight flameout of gas turbine engines, in many instances, is the result of transient reductions in engine air flow caused by many possible conditions such as particular aircraft maneuvers, contamination of intake airflow by exhaust products of self-propelled ordnance launched from aircraft, and severe ice ingestion by the engine. If the aircraft loses altitude or flight speed due to the engine flameout, or must be piloted to lower altitude in order to relight the engine, the mission of that particular aircraft is either compromised or completely aborted.
The first major effort on rapid relight of gas turbine engines appears to have been accomplished by the British. In early 1956, Proteous Engines of the Bristol Britannia Commercial Aircraft experienced flameout while flying through heavy precipitation of small ice crystals at very low air temperature. The British were successful in obtaining rapid relights under these icing conditions by inserting into the combustion chamber of the Proteous engine, a platinum glow plug. Apparently the platinum rod is heated to incandescence during normal engine operation, and this heat is retained sufficiently after flameout to relight the engine. The catalytic effects of platinum upon mixtures of hydrocarbon fuels and air probably aid the relight process also.
The Britannia remained popular until it was eclipsed by jet airliners, which were even faster. During the long years of the Cold War, which witnessed the rise (if for only a brief period) of the Soviet Union as a global naval power, both the Western and Soviet alliance systems devoted considerable attention to the anticipated problems of maritime air warfare. Both the Soviet Union and Western blocs produced large numbers of maritime patrol aircraft derived from long-range bombers (such as the Soviet Myasischev Bison, Tupolev Bear, Tupolev Badger, and Tupolev Backfire), airliners (notably the American Lockheed Electra > P-3 Orion, the British Bristol Britannia > Canadian Argus and the De Havilland Comet > British Aerospace Nimrod, and Soviet Ilyushin Il-18 Coot > Il-38 May).
