Comment by chasil
5 hours ago
The de Havilland Comet (involved in this event) also has a famously dark history as the first passenger jet.
This status was short-lived when square windows popped out of their frames at high altitude when the cabin was pressurized.
The line had a much longer service life hauling freight.
That's enough of an oversimplification as to not really be true.
They developed an issue with explosive decompressions, because at the time we didn't fully understand how cyclic stress caused metal fatigue. It is true that they had square-er windows than modern planes, but they knew that and added reinforcement. The stress concentrations inducing fatigue cracks were around square cutouts for an antenna, not the passenger windows. Also, the windows didn't pop out of their frames. Large portions of the fuselage ripped open.
And they lived a longer service life after the fuselage was reinforced in the areas that cracks were starting, but had trouble overcoming their bad reputation from the earlier explosive decompressions.
Source: the introduction to the Wikipedia article you linked. Read it.
As Henry Cavill would say: “Wikipedia? You get your facts from Wikipedia?”
Also as the Hawker Siddley (later BAe) Nimrod maritime surveillance aircraft.