“It still looks modern,” says Alistair Hodgson, curator of the de Havilland Aircraft Museum. “It was clean, it was aerodynamic and it looked like it would slip through the air perfectly – and of course, that’s what it did.”

“There’s an old saying in the aviation industry that if an aeroplane looks right, it’ll fly right,” says Hodgson. “It was the Concorde of its day – it flew higher, faster, smoother than any other airline of that time and made everything else obsolete.”

Inside there were seats for 36 passengers in two cabins. Those in first class were seated around tables – much like in a railway carriage. Apart from the cockpit, the rest of the fuselage was taken up by a large galley, luggage storage areas (there was no hold underneath) and separate toilets for ladies and gentlemen.

“That’s what happens when you allow engineers to design aircraft, rather than accountants,” says Hodgson. “If you look at a modern no-frills airline, every inch of space is given over to fare-paying passengers but that’s not what air travel was like in the 1940s.

“Air travel was just in its final days of being a thing for the rich only,” he says. “The primary way of travelling long distances was ocean liners.” In fact, many of the passengers of BOAC were civil servants off to run the British Empire.