From balloon shed to aircraft factory

The Royal Aircraft Factory started life as the Army Balloon Factory, which moved from Aldershot to the edge of Farnborough Common in 1905 and 1906 because it needed room to inflate an airship. Samuel Cody made the first aeroplane flight in Britain there in October 1908. In 1909 the Army gave up aeroplanes, the factory came under civilian control under Mervyn O’Gorman, and in 1912 it became the Royal Aircraft Factory. For a while it had no official permission to design aircraft at all, so its early designs were described as reconstructions of crashed machines, often using no parts of the wreck whatsoever.

Geoffrey de Havilland’s B.E.2

Its first new designer was Geoffrey de Havilland, chief designer and test pilot at once. His B.E.1 flew on 4 December 1911 and the near-identical B.E.2 followed early in 1912. At the Military Aeroplane Competition on Salisbury Plain in August 1912 the B.E.2 was barred from competing officially because O’Gorman was a judge, yet it outflew the field and on 12 August set a British altitude record of 10,560 ft. The B.E.2, with the Avro 500, helped make the tractor biplane the standard layout of the early military aeroplane.

Stable, safe, and Fokker fodder

Research by Edward Busk turned the B.E.2 into the inherently stable B.E.2c of 1914, ideal for artillery spotting and photography and hopeless in a dogfight. When the Fokker Eindecker arrived in late 1915, the B.E.2 squadrons suffered terribly, and a press campaign attacked the Factory’s near-monopoly over Royal Flying Corps designs. About 3,500 B.E.2s were built, most of them by private firms, some of which had never built an aircraft before. The B.E.12 single-seater was an outright failure.

The S.E.5

The Factory’s answer was the S.E.5, designed by Henry Folland, John Kenworthy and Major Frank Goodden around the Hispano-Suiza V8. It flew on 22 November 1916, and Goodden, the chief test pilot, was killed in the first prototype on 28 January 1917 because of a weakness in the wing. Once fixed, the S.E.5 and S.E.5a, 5,205 of them, helped restore Allied air superiority after Bloody April and carried aces such as Mick Mannock. The R.E.8 reconnaissance two-seater, first flown in June 1916, was built in even larger numbers than the B.E.2: 4,077.

Renamed to avoid confusion

On 1 April 1918 the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service merged into the Royal Air Force, and an RAF that was a factory could not share initials with an RAF that was an air force. The Factory became the Royal Aircraft Establishment and gave up building aircraft to concentrate on research. Its alumni spread across the industry: de Havilland founded his own company, Folland went to Gloster and later founded Folland Aircraft, and Samuel Heron’s radial engine became the Armstrong Siddeley Jaguar.

Fabrieken

• Farnborough · Farnborough, Hampshire — Factory site from 1905–1906; later RAE Farnborough

Mensen

• Mervyn O’Gorman · superintendent 1909–1916 — Ran the Balloon Factory and the Royal Aircraft Factory
• Geoffrey de Havilland · designer and test pilot — Designed the B.E.2; later founded de Havilland
• Henry Folland · designer — Co-designed the S.E.5; later Gloster and Folland Aircraft
• Frank Goodden · chief test pilot — Killed testing the S.E.5 prototype, 28 January 1917
• Edward Busk · scientist — Research behind the stable B.E.2c

Records en primeurs

• First aeroplane flight in the UK, by Samuel Cody at Farnborough, October 1908
• British altitude record of 10,560 ft in the B.E.2, 12 August 1912