A trainer that shot down a fighter

On 12 December 1942, Pilot Officer Jack Archer was flying a Wirraway, a two-seat trainer and general-purpose aircraft built in Melbourne, when he spotted a Japanese fighter about 300 metres below him, dived on it and sent it into the sea. It was thought at the time to be a Zero and later identified as a Nakajima Ki-43. It was the Wirraway’s only aerial victory, and it was won by an aircraft Australia had built precisely so it would never be left defenceless.

Essington Lewis’s insurance policy

The idea came from Essington Lewis, managing director of the steel giant BHP. Returning from Europe in 1935, he warned that in a war British aircraft might never arrive, and lobbied for an Australian industry. BHP, General Motors-Holden, Broken Hill Associated Smelters, ICI, the Orient Steam Navigation Company and Electrolytic Zinc formed the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, incorporated in Melbourne on 17 October 1936. Its general manager, Lawrence Wackett, a First World War flier often called the father of the Australian aircraft industry, chose the North American NA-16 as its first product. Modified as the Wirraway, it first flew on 27 March 1939; 755 were built.

Ordered off the drawing board

CAC even built the Wirraway’s Pratt & Whitney engine and some of its propellers, becoming one of very few firms to make airframe, engine and propeller. When Japan entered the war, the RAAF had no modern fighters, and CAC designed one in a hurry from Wirraway parts. The Boomerang was ordered off the drawing board before any prototype existed, flew on 29 May 1942, and was built 250 times. CAC also assembled and built 200 Mustangs.

The Avon Sabre

Its finest product was a Sabre unlike any other. For the CA-27, CAC redesigned the North American F-86F around the Rolls-Royce Avon, which was shorter, wider and lighter than the American engine and offered in theory more than double the thrust. CAC built 112 including the prototype, and they served in the Malayan Emergency and defended Malaysia and Thailand in the 1960s. The home-grown Winjeel trainer, 64 built, ran alongside.

Buses, saucepans and the last Kiowa

After the war CAC diversified into houses, pressure cookers, saucepans and, from 1946, more than 3,600 Comair bus bodies. It built parts for the Mirage III, 97 Macchi MB-326H trainers and 56 Bell Kiowa helicopters, the last delivered in 1977. In 1985 it became a subsidiary of Hawker de Havilland, renamed Hawker de Havilland Victoria in 1986, and in 2000 the business passed to Boeing Australia. In all, CAC produced more than 1,700 aircraft, almost 550 of them its own designs.

Factories

• Fishermans Bend · Melbourne, Victoria — Completed by September 1937
• Butler Hangar · Relocated to Tyabb, Mornington Peninsula — Victorian Heritage Register 2006

People

• Sir Lawrence Wackett · general manager — 1896–1982
• Essington Lewis · BHP managing director, instigator
• Ken Frewin · test pilot — First flew the Boomerang

Records and firsts

• Wirraway’s only air-to-air victory, 12 December 1942