01/31/2021. Remarks by Johan Visschedijk: "Although the two-seat Comet racer had won the 1934 MacRobertson Race to Australia, its performance was only marginally better than that of the Douglas DC-2 airliner with which it competed. Realizing that British airline operators would soon be unable to compete with foreign users of this type of American equipment, the de Havilland company sought financial assistance from the Air Ministry for the construction of a 200 m.p.h. four-engined passenger monoplane. After considerable delay and discussion, an order was placed on January 21, 1936 for two experimental transatlantic mailplanes (allotted the serials K8618, K8619) to Air Ministry Specification 36/35. They were to be equipped with extra fuselage tanks to permit the carriage of 1,000 lb. of payload for 2,500 miles against a 40 mph headwind at 210 mph.

The first aircraft was scheduled to fly in the autumn of that year but diversion of skilled labor to the D.H.93 Don contract delayed completion until the following spring. Carrying the 'Class B' marking E-2, the prototype was taken into the air for the first time by Chief Test Pilot R.G. Waight at Hatfield on May 20, 1937 and it was at once clear that the type name Albatross was well chosen and very appropriate to this most beautiful of all aircraft. The aircraft was registered to the Air Ministry as G-AEVV on January 3, 1938.

Designed by Arthur E. Hagg, it embodied lessons learned with the D.H.71, D.H.77 and D.H.88, achieving economy of operation through speed obtained by clean entry and aerodynamic refinement. The long, tapering circular section fuselage was of wooden stressed skin construction and consisted of laminations of cedar ply with a thick layer of balsa wood between. The layers were cemented under pressure on a retractable jig which enabled the whole fuselage shell to be lifted off in one piece. The one piece cantilever wing was built, as in the D.H.88, around a stress-bearing box spar with a thick planking of spruce applied diagonally in two layers. Wheel wells were constructed ahead of the main spar to house the large inward retracting landing gear, the mechanism for which was driven by a 5 hp electric motor.

The 525 hp Gipsy Twelve twelve-cylinder inverted V-engines were specially designed for the Albatross by Major F.B. Halford who united two Gipsy Six engines on a common crankcase.. It was of low frontal area and further reductions in drag were achieved by fitting large spinners on the two-bladed de Havilland controllable pitch airscrews and employing reverse flow cooling, air being led to the backs of the engines from intakes in the leading edge of the wing. The cantilever tail unit was fitted with twin, strutted fins carrying horn balanced rudders and the aircraft was statically exhibited in this configuration in the New Types Park at the Hendon RAF Display of June 26, 1937.

Early flight trials, flown by Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. after R.G. Waight was killed in the de Havilland T.K.4 on October 1, 1937, proved this arrangement unsatisfactory and the tail plane was redesigned with end mounted fins carrying unbalanced rudders with trim tabs. Teething troubles were also experienced with landing gear retraction, resulting in a belly landing at Hatfield on March 31, 1938.

With the 'Class B' marking E-3, the second prototype was first flown in July 1938, although it had been entered in the register to the Air Ministry as G-AEVW on January 3, 1938. During overload take off tests with on August 27, 1938 the rear fuselage broke in two during the final stages of the third landing run. The aircraft reappeared within a few weeks marked as E-5 with reinforcement modifications said to have weighed but 12.5 lb (5.7 kg) and these were embodied in five production aircraft which had been ordered for Imperial Airways Ltd. Apart from the extra tankage there were several minor differences between the mail and passenger versions, the latter having additional windows and slotted instead of split flaps.

The first airline version, c/n 6802, was first flown in June 1938, and marked E-2 (reused from first prototype) it was delivered to the CofA on October 17, and carrying the registration G-AFDI (which had been issued the previous June 28) it was delivered to Imperial Airways on November 8, 1938. Named Frobisher it became the flagship of the airline's new 'F' class which carried 22 passengers and four crew. They were first used on an experimental Christmas mail service to Cairo in December of that year and achieved an eastbound average speed of 219 mph (352 kmh). Fast competitive schedules were then instituted on the Croydon-Paris, Brussels and Zurich routes on January 2, 1939 and a week later on January 10, Falcon (G-AFDJ c/n 6803) shattered the first of the inter-city records by landing at Brussels 48 minutes after leaving Croydon.

Imperial Airways crews then made experimental flights with the two long-range mailplanes, which were added to the 'F' class as Faraday (G-AEVV) and Franklin (G-AEVW) for the purpose. Fortuna (G-AFDK c/n 6804) left for Karachi on August 30, 1939 carrying eleven senior Army officers, returning after a rapid turn round to find war declared and the Albatross fleet evacuated to Bramcote. Almost immediately their base was switched to Whitchurch, Bristol, where they were hurriedly camouflaged for use on the Lisbon and Shannon shuttle services. A year later some of them flew on an emergency courier service for Government documents and officials to Egypt and India, opened when Capt. A.C.P. Johnson left Shoreham in Fortuna on September 22, 1940.

The two long-range aircraft (G-AEVV, G-AEVW) were impressed in September 1940 for service with No. 271 (Transport) Squadron on the Iceland shuttle, but in the confusion of the period, serial numbers issued by the Air Ministry during the design stage were overlooked and new serials AX903 and AX904 were allotted, and they were coded BJ-V and BJ-W respectively. Both retained their 'F' class names and both were destroyed in crashes at Reykjavik, August 11, 1941 and April 7, 1942 respectively.

The passenger fleet also lost Fingal (G-AFDL c/n 6805) which forced landed at Pucklechurch, Gloucestershire with a fractured fuel line and collided with a farmhouse in October 1940. For several years thereafter its remains were stacked up on the flat roof-top of C.J. Packer's garage at Burton, Wiltshire. The flagship was destroyed in a German air raid on Whitchurch on December 20, 1940, after which the three survivors maintained the various shuttles until Fortuna, Capt. G. P. Moss, crashed on the mud flats near Shannon in July 1943. With spares non-existent Fiona (G-AFDM c/n 6806) and Falcon were broken up a few months later.