The first transition from hover to free flight of the Hawker Siddeley P. 1127 took place on 8 September 1961 at RAE Bedford , with its first conventional flight also there on 13 March 1961 ; the Harrier was first delivered to RAF Wittering on 18 April 1969 to 1 Squadron ; the next squadron to have the Harrier was 4 Sqn at RAF Wildenrath . In June 1954 , the first Hunting Percival Jet Provost flew from Luton Airport ; it was the world 's first-designed jet trainer aircraft . On 30 April 1958 , the Buccaneer first flew from RAE Bedford . The Hybrid Air Vehicles HAV-3 , unveiled in 2014 at Cardington , is the longest aircraft in the world . The Comet G-ALYP was the first to enter commercial service for a jet , on 2 May 1952 , on a flight from London Airport to Johannesburg ; flying back from Rome to London , on a flight from Singapore on 10 January 1954 , the aircraft was the second Comet to crash in-flight on BOAC Flight 781 , and maybe the first to show structural failure ; 114 Comets were made . The British Aerospace 125 ( DH .125 ) was the world 's first business jet , when it first flew in August 1962 at Hatfield , later mostly built at Chester ( Broughton ) ; later it evolved into the Hawker 800 , made in Wichita , Kansas , and the design is the world 's best selling business jet , with over 1,000 built . The Airbus A300 , which entered service in 1974 , started life as the Hawker Siddeley/Breguet/Nord HBN 100 , with much of the initial design produced by Hawker Siddeley from its HS .134 design ; the wings were developed from the Trident supercritical design ( designed in the late 1950s ) . Of the companies involved with Airbus at the beginning , only Hawker Siddeley ( former De Havilland ) at Hatfield had designed anything as large with jet engines ; the company may have consequently been headquartered at Hatfield and not Toulouse . Today 's Airbus wings are made at Broughton in Flintshire , and all the undercarriage is made in Cheltenham ( Messier-Bugatti-Dowty )
BOAC Flight 781
BOAC Flight 781
East of England