Fred, Blossom and the trainers

Miles was really a family. Frederick George Miles designed the aircraft with his wife Maxine “Blossom” Miles, an aviator and draughtswoman, and his brother George. Their partner was Phillips & Powis, founded at Reading in 1928, which opened Woodley Aerodrome in 1929 and built Miles designs under its own name; Rolls-Royce bought in in 1936, and only in 1943 did the firm become Miles Aircraft Ltd. By then it had made the Magister, the first monoplane designed as an RAF trainer, with 1,293 built, and more than 3,000 Master advanced trainers across three marks.

The aeroplane meant to beat sound

Miles also thought big. In October 1943 the Air Ministry gave it a secret contract for the M.52, a jet meant to fly at 1,000 mph, more than twice the speed record of the day. Design was said to be 90 per cent complete in 1944. In February 1946 the new Labour government cancelled it. Miles’s chief aerodynamicist Dennis Bancroft later said Bell Aircraft had been given the M.52 drawings under an exchange agreement that the US never honoured. In October 1948 an unmanned rocket model of the design reached Mach 1.38 in level flight.

Receivership and the Old Bailey

Peace was cruel. Despite some £5 million of orders for the Messenger and Gemini, Miles Aircraft went into receivership in 1947 after a creditor’s petition, and the new board stopped aircraft work. Fred Miles and Sir William Mount stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1950 over the company’s prospectus; the jury stopped the case and both were discharged. Handley Page took the aviation assets and built the Miles Marathon airliner. Fred Miles carried on as F. G. Miles Ltd at Redhill and Shoreham until its aircraft interests went to Beagle in 1961.

מפעלים

• Woodley works · Woodley Aerodrome, Reading, Berkshire — Main plant; aerodrome opened 1929
• Banbridge and Long Kesh · County Down and RAF Long Kesh, Northern Ireland — Messenger components and assembly; moved to Newtownards in 1946
• F. G. Miles Ltd · Redhill and Shoreham aerodromes — Post-1948 company

אֲנָשִׁים

• Frederick George Miles · designer and managing figure
• Maxine “Blossom” Miles · aviator, draughtswoman, director of the Miles Aeronautical Technical School
• George Herbert Miles · designer; later chief designer of Beagle-Miles
• Dennis Bancroft · chief aerodynamicist on the M.52

שיאים וראשונות

• Magister: first monoplane designed as a trainer for the RAF
• M.52 scale rocket model reached Mach 1.38 in stable level flight, 10 October 1948