de Havilland

Geoffrey de Havilland was born in 1882, the son of a clergyman, and trained as an engineer. Like many young men of his generation he was drawn to motor cars and motorcycles before aeroplanes, and like very few of them he decided to build a flying machine with no one to teach him. With an advance of £1,000 from his maternal grandfather he designed and built a biplane, engine included, in a rented workshop in Fulham. In December 1909 he tried to fly it on the Highclere estate in Hampshire; after a short run the wing structure failed and the aircraft was wrecked.

He salvaged the engine and built a second, simpler biplane, which flew in September 1910. It was good enough for the War Office to buy it for £400, and with it came de Havilland himself, appointed designer and test pilot at the Army's Balloon Factory at Farnborough, soon renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory. There he worked on some of the first practical military aircraft in Britain, and learned the discipline of turning a design into something that could be built in numbers.

In May 1914 he moved to private industry as chief designer of the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, Airco, owned by George Holt Thomas. The war made Airco one of the largest aircraft firms in the world and made the initials DH famous. The DH.2 single-seat fighter, the DH.4 day bomber and the DH.9 that followed were built in thousands in Britain, and the DH.4 was put into mass production in the United States as well. Machines of de Havilland design are credited with some 30 per cent of all British and American aircraft of the war years.

Peace ruined Airco as quickly as war had built it. Orders collapsed, the company was sold, and in 1920 it failed. De Havilland decided to carry on alone. With a small group of colleagues from Airco and start-up money from Holt Thomas, he formed the de Havilland Aircraft Company in September 1920 and moved almost at once to Stag Lane, a modest grass aerodrome at Edgware. The first year's turnover was a little over £32,000. In 1922 the company bought the aerodrome outright for £20,000.

The early years at Stag Lane were lean. The company built airliners in small numbers for the new cross-Channel services, took on repair work and ran a flying school, but it had no product that could sell in quantity. De Havilland's answer was to design one. He believed there was a market for an aeroplane simple and cheap enough for a private owner or a flying club, and in the DH.60 Moth, first flown on 22 February 1925, he built it: a small two-seat biplane with folding wings, so that it could be kept in a shed, and a four-cylinder engine of modest power.

The Moth arrived at the right moment. The Air Ministry was subsidising light aeroplane clubs across Britain, and the clubs wanted exactly this aircraft. It sold at home, then abroad, in versions with wooden and later metal fuselages, and it turned a word into a genus: for years afterwards any light biplane in Britain was liable to be called a moth. The company floated on the stock market in 1928 on the strength of it.

The Moth also carried the record flights that made aviation a popular sensation between the wars. The most famous was Amy Johnson's: in May 1930, with little long-distance experience, she flew a second-hand Gipsy Moth she had named Jason solo from Croydon to Darwin, the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia. The aircraft now hangs in the Science Museum in London.

Success outgrew Stag Lane. Housing was spreading around the aerodrome, and in 1930 the company established a new factory and airfield in open country beside the Great North Road at Hatfield, in Hertfordshire. The move was completed in 1934, and Stag Lane was sold for development except for a small site kept by the engine business. Hatfield would be de Havilland's home for the rest of its independent life.

The aircraft that filled the new factory was the DH.82 Tiger Moth, first flown on 26 October 1931. It was a Moth reworked for military training, with the upper wing moved forward so that an instructor in the front seat could get out in a hurry wearing a parachute. The RAF made it its standard elementary trainer, and the Commonwealth air training schemes of the Second World War spread it across the Empire. When Hatfield was needed for other work, production moved to Morris Motors at Cowley, which built more than 4,000; total production of all Tiger Moths reached 8,868. A radio-controlled version, the Queen Bee, served as an anti-aircraft target.

By the late 1930s the Air Ministry wanted metal bombers bristling with gun turrets, and de Havilland proposed the opposite: a small, unarmed two-seat bomber built of wood, powered by two Rolls-Royce Merlins and relying on speed alone to survive. The idea was rejected more than once. The company went ahead with it as a private venture, and when the Ministry finally placed an order in 1940 it was for an aircraft that existed only on paper.

The design team worked away from Hatfield, in the moated manor of Salisbury Hall at London Colney, where the prototype W4050 was built in secret and taken by road to Hatfield for its first flight on 25 November 1940. It was faster than the fighters of the day. The prototype survives today in the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, on the very site where it was built.

Wood was the Mosquito's real advantage. Its fuselage was a sandwich of birch ply over balsa, moulded in two halves; the skills and the materials came from furniture makers, piano factories and joiners' shops that the aluminium industry could not use. Components were made in small workshops across Britain and brought together at Hatfield and at other assembly lines, and production spread to Canada and Australia. Hatfield's capacity was so precious that Tiger Moth production was moved out to Morris Motors to make room.

The unarmed bomber became almost everything else as well: a photographic reconnaissance aircraft that ranged over the whole of occupied Europe, a night fighter, a fighter-bomber, a pathfinder for Bomber Command, an anti-shipping strike aircraft and even a fast transport for BOAC between Scotland and Sweden. By the time production ended after the war, 7,781 had been built.

The war also enlarged the company. De Havilland took control of the Portsmouth manufacturer Airspeed in 1940, and its engine and propeller businesses became major suppliers in their own right. Above all, the Air Ministry asked it in 1941 to design a jet fighter, and Frank Halford a jet engine to power it.

Halford's engine became the Goblin, and the fighter became the Vampire, which first flew on 20 September 1943. To keep the jet pipe short and the thrust losses small, the designers put the pilot and engine in a compact central nacelle and carried the tail on two slender booms: a layout that became the signature of de Havilland's jet fighters. The Vampire arrived too late for the war but served the RAF and some thirty other air forces afterwards, was built under licence abroad, and in December 1945 a navalised Sea Vampire made the first landing by a jet aircraft on an aircraft carrier. Its successors, the Venom and the carrier-borne Sea Vixen, kept the twin booms.

The jet age cost the founder dearly. His son Geoffrey de Havilland Jr, the company's chief test pilot, was killed on 27 September 1946 when the tailless DH.108 research aircraft broke up over the Thames Estuary; another son, John, had died in a wartime collision between two Mosquitoes. The founder, knighted in 1944, continued at the head of the company.

The company's great ambition was civil. The wartime Brabazon Committee had called for a jet-powered mail and passenger aircraft, and de Havilland, with the Goblin and its larger successor the Ghost in hand, took it on. The DH.106 Comet first flew at Hatfield on 27 July 1949, piloted by John Cunningham. It was a four-engined airliner with the engines buried in the wing roots, a pressurised cabin and a cruising altitude far above the weather that piston airliners had to fly through.

On 2 May 1952 BOAC's Comet G-ALYP left London for Johannesburg with fare-paying passengers, opening the world's first jet airliner service. Journey times fell by around half, and airlines in France, Canada and elsewhere placed orders. For a brief period Britain appeared to have a lead in civil aviation that American manufacturers would take years to close.

De Havilland also remained a major military supplier through the 1950s. Beyond the Sea Vixen, its propeller business developed the Firestreak air-to-air missile and later the Blue Streak ballistic missile, and its engine company supplied the Gyron and the Gnome turboshaft among others.

The first Moths flew on the ADC Cirrus, an engine made largely from surplus wartime parts, and supply of it was a constraint the company could not control. In 1927 de Havilland asked the engine designer Frank Halford to produce a replacement of its own. The result was the Gipsy, an air-cooled four-cylinder in-line engine, and the Moth fitted with it became the Gipsy Moth. From that point de Havilland was an engine manufacturer as well as an airframe one.

The line grew quickly. The Gipsy Major, with its cylinders inverted to give the pilot a better view over the nose, powered the Tiger Moth and a long list of other light aircraft, many of them not de Havilland's own. The six-cylinder Gipsy Six followed. Propellers were added in 1935, when a separate company began building variable-pitch designs under licence from Hamilton Standard, and in 1944 the engine side was formally established as the de Havilland Engine Company. By then it was working on jets.

The Gipsy Six made possible the most glamorous aircraft the company ever built. In 1934 the Australian confectionery magnate Sir Macpherson Robertson put up prize money for an air race from England to Melbourne, and de Havilland offered a purpose-built racer at a fixed price to any British entrant who would order one before a deadline. Three were ordered. The DH.88 Comet was a slim twin-engined monoplane built almost entirely of wood, with a retractable undercarriage and the crew seated in tandem far back in the fuselage. Only five were ever made.

The race started from Mildenhall at dawn on 20 October 1934. The red Comet G-ACSS, named Grosvenor House and flown by Charles Scott and Tom Campbell Black, reached Melbourne in 70 hours 54 minutes and won the speed prize outright. The lesson of the race was not lost on de Havilland: a clean wooden airframe with modest engines could be very fast indeed. G-ACSS survives with the Shuttleworth Collection.

The everyday business of the 1930s was smaller airliners. The DH.84 Dragon, the four-engined DH.86 and the DH.89 Dragon Rapide were twin- and four-engined biplanes built for the short routes of Britain's new internal airlines and for operators across the Empire. The Rapide in particular was cheap, easy to fly and able to use rough fields, and it was built in hundreds and flown for decades. At the other end of the range the DH.91 Albatross of 1937 was an elegant four-engined wooden monoplane airliner, a further step on the path that led to the Mosquito.

The Moth took de Havilland abroad early. Its first overseas subsidiary was set up in Melbourne in March 1927 to sell aircraft and supply parts, and de Havilland Aircraft of Canada followed in 1928, first at De Lesseps Field in Toronto and from 1929 at Downsview. A New Zealand company was formed in March 1939 at Rongotai, Wellington. In each case the original purpose was modest: to assemble British-built Moths close to their customers.

The Second World War turned the assembly shops into factories. De Havilland Australia moved to Sydney, built a new works at Bankstown and by 1945 had produced more than a thousand aircraft, mostly Tiger Moths, before going on to build 212 Mosquitoes. De Havilland Canada built Tiger Moths for the Commonwealth air training plan and then Mosquitoes at Downsview. New Zealand built Tiger Moths for its own air force.

After the war the Australian company designed aircraft of its own for local conditions. The most successful was the DHA-3 Drover, a three-engined light transport of the late 1940s used by Qantas and by the Royal Flying Doctor Service; when Mosquito production ended in 1948 the Drover became the factory's main work.

It was Canada, though, that became a manufacturer in its own right. Its first design, the DHC-1 Chipmunk, flew on 22 May 1946 and was adopted as the RAF's standard elementary trainer, replacing the Tiger Moth; it was even built under licence in Britain. The subsidiary then turned to the aircraft its own country needed: machines that could carry people and supplies into the northern bush, on wheels, skis or floats.

The DHC-2 Beaver, first flown on 16 August 1947, was the result, and 1,657 were built. The larger DHC-3 Otter followed in 1951, then the twin-engined Caribou and Buffalo transports. With these types de Havilland Canada developed a speciality, short take-off and landing aircraft for difficult places, that it would carry into the turboprop age long after the parent company had gone.

The Comet disaster left de Havilland technically respected and financially weakened, and the British government was by the late 1950s determined to reduce the number of aircraft companies competing for its contracts. The industry consolidated into a handful of groups. In 1960 de Havilland was acquired by Hawker Siddeley, which already owned Avro, Gloster, Armstrong Whitworth and Hawker; Blackburn and Folland joined the same group. The engine company went its own way and was merged into Bristol Siddeley in 1961.

The last designs of the independent company were completed under the new owner. The DH.121 Trident, a three-engined short-haul jet built for British European Airways, first flew in 1962 and became the Hawker Siddeley Trident; its sales were hurt by BEA's request to shrink the original design. The DH.125 business jet, also first flown in 1962, did better, and its lineage stayed in production for decades under later owners.

In 1963 the de Havilland name was dropped in Britain, and the company became the de Havilland Division of Hawker Siddeley Aviation. Hawker Siddeley's aircraft interests were nationalised into British Aerospace in 1977, and Hatfield, where the Moth, the Mosquito and the Comet had been built, continued under British Aerospace until it closed in 1993. Part of the site is now the University of Hertfordshire's de Havilland Campus.

The overseas subsidiaries followed different paths. De Havilland Australia became Hawker de Havilland, and the brand had all but disappeared from Australia by the early 1990s. De Havilland Canada, which had built the Beaver and the Otter into worldwide bush-flying standards, stayed under Hawker Siddeley's ownership until 1974, when the Canadian government bought it.

The Comet's first year brought accidents on take-off that were blamed on pilot technique and wing design, and in May 1953 a Comet broke up in a violent storm near Calcutta. Then, on 10 January 1954, G-ALYP, the aircraft that had opened jet service, disintegrated at altitude shortly after leaving Rome and fell into the sea off Elba, killing all 35 people on board. The fleet was grounded, modifications were made against suspected causes such as engine fire, and flights resumed in March. On 8 April a second Comet, G-ALYY, operating for South African Airways, broke up in the climb off Naples with the loss of 21 lives. The Comet 1's certificate of airworthiness was withdrawn.

What followed was one of the founding investigations of modern air safety. The Royal Navy recovered much of G-ALYP's wreckage from the seabed, and at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough the fuselage of another Comet, G-ALYU, was sealed in a huge water tank and repeatedly pressurised and flexed to simulate flight after flight. After the equivalent of 3,057 flights, a crack ran from the corner of a window cut-out and the cabin burst. Wreckage from G-ALYP then showed fatigue cracking that began at the corner of a cut-out for the automatic direction finder in the cabin roof.

The public inquiry under Lord Cohen concluded that the fuselage had failed through metal fatigue caused by the high stresses at the corners of openings in the pressure cabin, stresses that the design and test methods of the day had not predicted. No one had been reckless; the knowledge had simply not existed. The upper fuselage section from G-ALYP, with the fatigue cracks visible around the direction-finder windows, is preserved in the Science Museum Group collection.

The consequences reached far beyond Hatfield. Full-scale fatigue testing of pressurised structures became standard practice, openings were given rounded corners and reinforcement, and designers moved towards fail-safe structures able to carry the load even after a crack has formed. The investigation also established the practice of rebuilding an aircraft from recovered wreckage to find the origin of a failure. Every pressurised airliner since has been designed in that light.

De Havilland rebuilt the Comet with a thicker skin and rounded windows. The larger Comet 4 opened BOAC's transatlantic jet service between London and New York on 4 October 1958, but by then the Boeing 707 was only weeks from service, bigger and with longer range. The Comet was a respectable airliner and later the basis of the RAF's Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft, but just 114 were built. The years lost to the grounding had handed the jet airliner market to the United States.

De Havilland Canada carried the name into the turboprop era. The DHC-6 Twin Otter, first flown in 1965, took the bush-plane formula to two turbine engines and became the workhorse of short, rough and high-altitude airstrips, from Arctic Canada to the Himalayas. The four-engined DHC-7 Dash 7 of 1975 applied short take-off and landing performance to a regional airliner, and the twin-engined DHC-8 Dash 8, first flown in 1983, became a standard regional aircraft around the world.

Ownership changed repeatedly. The Canadian government sold the company to Boeing in 1986; after heavy losses Boeing sold it in 1992 to Bombardier, under which the Dash 8 was developed into the larger Q400 and the de Havilland name faded from the product line. In 2006 Viking Air of Victoria, British Columbia, bought the type certificates for the out-of-production designs from the DHC-1 to the DHC-7, and put a modernised Twin Otter back into production.

In November 2018 Viking's parent, Longview Aviation Capital, agreed to buy the Dash 8 programme from Bombardier together with the rights to the de Havilland name and trademark. The deal closed on 3 June 2019, when Longview launched De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited, with more than 1,200 employees transferring from Bombardier. The de Havilland Canada product line was under one owner for the first time since 2006, and the company later also took on the former Canadair water bombers as the DHC-515.

In Britain the legacy is kept by museums and by the aircraft themselves. The de Havilland Aircraft Museum at Salisbury Hall preserves the Mosquito prototype where it was built; the Science Museum holds Amy Johnson's Jason and the fuselage of G-ALYP; the Shuttleworth Collection keeps Grosvenor House; and Tiger Moths still teach people to fly. Geoffrey de Havilland died in 1965. The company he founded lasted forty years under his name, and the lessons of its greatest failure are built into every airliner flying today.