The boy with the model monoplane

In June 1910 a 23-year-old power-station chemist won the longest-flight prize at a model aeroplane contest at Crystal Palace with a home-made monoplane. Charles Richard Fairey went on to work at Short Brothers, and when the RNAS and the RFC both turned him down for war service he started his own company instead. Fairey Aviation was founded in 1915 with the Belgian engineer Ernest Oscar Tips, working from an office in Piccadilly and factory space borrowed from the Gramophone Company at Hayes. It began by building other firms’ designs, including 100 Sopwith 1½ Strutters, before its own Hamble Baby and Campania seaplanes took to the water.

Navy blue

Fairey found its niche at sea. The Fairey III family, first flown in September 1917, ran to 964 aircraft and served for a quarter of a century. Portuguese crews used Fairey IIIs to make the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic in 1922, and in 1926 four IIIDs flew the RAF’s first formation flight from Cairo to the Cape. In 1933 Fairey’s Long-range Monoplane flew non-stop from Cranwell to Walvis Bay, 5,410 miles, for a world distance record. Fairey also had a knack for borrowing talent: Reed propellers, Youngman flaps and an imported Curtiss engine renamed the Felix all carried its name.

The Stringbag

Its most famous aircraft looked obsolete the day it flew. The Swordfish, a fabric-covered biplane first flown on 17 April 1934, was nicknamed the Stringbag. On the night of 11 November 1940 Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto, sinking one battleship and damaging two more, a raid that proved carrier aircraft could cripple a navy on their own. Six months later a Swordfish torpedo jammed the rudder of the Bismarck. The type sank more Axis tonnage than any other Allied aircraft and stayed in front-line service until VE Day, outliving the aircraft meant to replace it. Of 2,391 built, Blackburn made 1,699.

Tragedy of the Battle

The Battle was Fairey’s great disappointment. A modern Merlin-powered monoplane light bomber, it first flew on 10 March 1936 and was ordered in huge numbers, at one point 2,419 aircraft. During the Phoney War a Battle gunner scored the RAF’s first air victory of the war. Then came May 1940. Attacking German columns in France, Battle squadrons often lost more than half their aircraft on a single mission, and two posthumous Victoria Crosses were won attacking the Maastricht bridges. By the end of 1940 the type had been pulled from front-line service. Fairey’s later naval aircraft, the Fulmar, Barracuda and Firefly, kept its Stockport and Hayes lines busy.

Past 1,000 mph

After the war Fairey chased speed and rotors. On 10 March 1956 test pilot Peter Twiss flew the Fairey Delta 2 at 1,132 mph, the first jet to exceed 1,000 mph in level flight and 310 mph faster than the previous record. One FD2 was later rebuilt as the BAC 221 to test Concorde’s wing. The Rotodyne, a tip-jet compound gyroplane airliner, first flew in November 1957 and set a convertiplane speed record of 190.9 mph, but its noise and the lack of firm orders killed it in 1962. By then the government had pushed Fairey’s aircraft business into Westland in 1960.

Rotodyne and the end

What remained was an engineering group that built bridges, nuclear reactor parts, Land Rover winches and sailing dinghies. Fairey Marine turned wartime hot-moulding techniques into thousands of boats named after the aircraft: Firefly, Albacore, Swordfish. The Belgian offshoot Avions Fairey, founded by Tips in 1931, built aircraft for Belgium for decades. The parent collapsed into receivership in 1977, overstretched by a Britten-Norman Islander line in Belgium, and was taken over by the state. Pieces survive as Spectris, the Stockport bridge builder now called KNDS UK, and the Fairey Band, formed by aviation workers in 1937 and still winning titles.

Fábricas

• North Hyde Road works · Hayes, Middlesex — Main factory; built the Swordfish and the Rotodyne
• Heaton Chapel works · Stockport, Cheshire — Former National Aircraft Factory No. 2, bought 1934; Battles, Fulmars, Barracudas
• Ringway · Manchester — Flight test airfield for Stockport production from 1937
• Great West Aerodrome · Harmondsworth, Middlesex — Fairey airfield 1930–1944; requisitioned and now part of Heathrow
• Hamble · Hamble-le-Rice, Hampshire — Seaplane base; later home of Fairey Marine
• White Waltham · Berkshire — Flight test base 1947–1964

Gente

• Sir Richard Fairey · founder and chairman — 1887–1956; knighted 1942; led the company for forty years
• Ernest Oscar Tips · co-founder — Belgian engineer; founded Avions Fairey in 1931
• Peter Twiss · test pilot — Flew the Delta 2 to the 1956 world speed record
• J. A. J. Bennett · rotorcraft designer — Inventor of the Gyrodyne concept

Récords y primicias

• First aerial crossing of the South Atlantic, Portuguese Fairey IIIs, 1922
• World long-distance record, Cranwell to Walvis Bay, 5,410 miles, Long-range Monoplane, February 1933
• Helicopter speed record, 124.3 mph, FB-1 Gyrodyne, 28 June 1948
• First jet to exceed 1,000 mph in level flight; world speed record 1,132 mph, Delta 2, 10 March 1956
• Convertiplane speed record, 190.9 mph, Rotodyne, 5 January 1959