De Havilland Company

From The Space Library

The De Havilland Aircraft Company was formed by Geoffrey De Havilland on September 25 1920. De Havilland had built and flown his first aircraft on September 10 1910. His was one of the first British aeroplanes that really flew. He was one of the few pioneers who remained at the head of the early aviation companies of their own founding.

He formed The de Havilland Aircraft Company Limited after the closing down of The Aircraft Manufacturing Company Limited, of which he had been the chief designer under G. Holt Thomas throughout the war.

One-third of the air strength of the allies, including nearly all the combat aircraft built in America in that five-year conflict, were of de Havilland design.

With men who were his colleagues at that time he had striven to develop the little firm which he formed into a world-wide group of companies employing more than 37,000 people by 1960. Under his leadership, Francis T. Hearle, Charles C. Walker, Wilfred E. Nixon and Francis E.N. St. Barbe, founder members of the company, headed the working team that directed the organisation through the years of peace and conflict in which this expansion came about.

1n the fortieth year of the enterprise, the year which marked the half-century of de Havilland's own flying experience, he saw it united with a group headed by a notable pioneer of military aircraft design, Sir Thomas Sopwith, whom he knew well from the very early days. Great names, including those of A. V. Roe, Hawker, Gloster, Armstrong Whitworth, Blackburn and Folland, were brought together for the tasks of the second half-century of the de Havilland group, for the era of supersonic flight near and beyond the limit of the Earth's atmosphere.

Through the first World War, through the day of the Moth and the first Gipsy engines, through the struggle to achieve unsubsidised air transport on very little traffic, through the second great war effort and the age of the jet-turbine fighter and airliner, to the point where a de Havilland company directed the engineering of a rocket that could have been a deadly missile or a vehicle of space travel.

Sir Geoffrey's interest, with those around him, always lay in the engineering itself. Sir Thomas Sopwith and he were encouraged by the technical ability and resources of the combined teams, headed by men such as Sir Roy Dobson and Sir Aubrey Burke, who like themselves had come forward along the hard path of experience.