Airspeed

History

Following the closure of Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company, Nevil Shute Norway and Alfred Hessell Tiltman, along with support from Alan Cobham and Lord Grimthorpe (b. 1891 - d. 1963), founded Airspeed Limited at York in 1931. Tiltman became Chief Designer, while Norway served as Chief Engineer. They had already done some preliminary design work for two/three seat private owner type, but this was too ambitious a project for the fledgling company. Cobham told the board he had a need for a small passenger plane for use by his National Aviation Day venture, but no order could currently be placed, so meantime the company began work on a much more modest design, the AS.1 Tern glider.

The AS.1 Tern, the first British high-performance sailplane, was able to fly in two or three months while the design office and workshop was being set up in half of an empty bus garage, on Piccadilly in York. Norway himself was the pilot on the Tern's first test flight. In 1932, Airspeed produced the AS.4 Ferry to meet Alan Cobham's requirements.

In March 1933 the firm moved to Portsmouth where the City Council gave generous terms for a factory building constructed to Airspeed's requirements at the local airport, and during this period produced the Courier (the first British type with a retractable undercarriage to go into production) followed by the first of a twin-engined development of the Courier, the Airspeed Envoy, in 1934. Lord Grimthorpe's nephew, Lawrence Aldred Mervyn Dundas (later 3rd Marquess of Zetland, b. 12 November 1908 – d. 5 October 1989), became one of Airspeed's "£5 per week working shareholders" and set up a company, R K Dundas Limited, together with Ronald Douglas King (Airspeed's sales manager), to act as Airspeed sales agents in India and Burma, later taking over as UK sales agents from Aircraft Exchange and Mart. In the following year, Airspeed became associated with the Tyneside ship builder Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Limited and Airspeed (1934) Limited made a public issue of shares in August 1934.

In 1934, Norway negotiated with Anthony Fokker for a licensing agreement with Fokker. In 1935, Airspeed signed a manufacturing licensing agreement for the Douglas DC-2 and several Fokker types, with Fokker to be a consultant for seven years. Airspeed considered making the Fokker D.XVII fighter for Greece, which wanted to buy from Britain for currency reasons. Norway, along with a Fokker representative "who was well accustomed to methods of business in the Balkans", spent three weeks in Athens, but did not close the deal. After a year, the drift to war, and their Air Ministry contracts, meant that the Dutch could not go to the Airspeed factory or board meetings.

1937 saw the development of Airspeed's most successful aircraft, the Oxford, in response to a requirement for a capable trainer aircraft that conformed with Specification T.23/36, its basic design derived from the company's earlier AS.6 Envoy.

Norway left the firm in 1938, partially over a disagreement with Tiltman, and partially because, with success and mass production, much of the excitement had gone out of the effort. In 1940, de Havilland bought the shares in Airspeed held by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson Limited, but the company retained a separate identity, reverting to the name of Airspeed Limited on 25 January 1944. During this time, they produced the Horsa troop carrying glider which was to be Tiltman's last design for the company. Hessell Tiltman left Airspeed in 1942 and in 1945 formed a research partnership with Marcus Langley which, in 1948, became Tiltman Langley Laboratories.

Postwar Airspeed produced the elegant Ambassador airliner, but this was to be its final original design to make it to production (the last Airspeed product, the Consul, being merely a civilianized Oxford). During this time, Airspeed also provided additional design and manufacturing support to de Havilland, but in 1951 completely merged with them and the Airspeed name disappeared.

Company References

1. Airspeed Aircraft Since 1931, H.A. Taylor (Putnam, 1970)
2. Flight 23 Feb 1951