BRITISH AEROSPACE A SOUVENIR OFTHE WEYBRIDGE HERITAGE YEARS BAC THE GREAT WEYBRIDGE HERITAGE From the very first attempts at powered man-carrying flight in Britain in 1970, through an exceptionally varied cavalcade of almost every type of aircraft to its wide-ranging work programme of recent years, it can justifiably be claimed that the World-famous Brooklands complex at Weybridge has witnessed and realised a longer and greater range of aeronautical technology than any other single site in the World. GENESIS Originally a marshy tract of farmland and rough shooting straddling the river Wey, the 'Brooklands Estate' naturally bequeathed this now very well-known name to the motor-racing track built there during the winter of 1906-7. Its mentor was Hugh Fortescue Locke-King, a local industrialist, who notably built a number of hotels in Egypt (and on his Mena House Hotel in Cairo was based the Brooklands Club House). Brooklands was the World's first closed-circuit motor-racing track and notably incorporated the first large-scale use of reinforced concrete construction in this country. It was 23/4 miles in periphery and enclosed approximately 360 acres of land area. Following a preview drive in January 1907, Brooklands was formally opened for motor-racing on June 28/29,1907. THE BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION Significantly, the size and enclosed nature of the Brooklands site also formed a natural confine for testingthe rudimentary aeroplanes that were just beginning to appear in Britain at that time. Indeed, it was the great British aviation pioneer Alliott Verdon-Roe who made the very first attempts at powered flight in Britain at Brooklands only three months later in September 1907 - with what was little more than a 'flying bicycle' powered by a 9hp JAP engine - and only four years after the Wright Brothers had made the World's first-ever powered aeroplane flight in the USA. In more recent times, a commemorative plaque was placed on the actual site of Roe's first flight, in the forecourt of the former Club House that is now the Brooklands Museum. As well as being dubbed The Cradle of British Motor-racing', Brooklands thus also quickly became the birthplace of the British aviation industry. The well-known film: Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines' most graphically depicts the scene and activities at Brooklands circa 1910. (However, it was not actually shot at Brooklands but on a special film set erected at Booker in Oxfordshire). Among the great British aviation names who made their mark at Brooklands, and who are depicted in this film, were: Bleriot, A.V. Roe, the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company (the forerunner of 'Bristol'), Vickers, Sopwith, Hawker, Martin and Han-dasyde. Their combined output meant that Brooklands became the largest British aircraft manufacturing centre in World War One. The Vickers lineage - which since 1960 has been conjoined first in 'British Aircraft Corporation' (BAC) and now 'British Aerospace' (BAe) - is today incorporated within the Military Aircraft Division of BAe, having initially formed a Flying School at Brooklands in July 1911 and transferred its rudimentary aircraft manufacturing facilities there from Erith in Kent four years later in the early part of World War One. VICKERS COMES Vickers, which had taken up an increasing business interest in aviation from 1908, actually began aircraft manufacture at Brooklands in August 1915 - in the old 'Italia' motor works, which was located on the right-hand side of the passage to what is today the machine-shop and alongside the main surgery. Brought from Vickers at St. Albans in 1916 at the instigation of Rex Pierson, renowned Vickers' Chief Designer at Weybridge, the 'Four Foot' wind tunnel that was to serve the design team for just 50 years until its removal in 1966, was also located on this site. This historic little wind tunnel was one of the earliest in commercial use anywhere in the World. The first aircraft type produced by Vickers at Weybridge was the 'BE2C' biplane designed at the (Government-owned) 'Royal Aircraft Factory' at Farnborough - of which 75 were made at Brooklands between 1915 and 1916 (at a cost of £925 each). Fifty Farnborough 'FE8' biplanes were also built at Weybridge in 1916, followed by 1,650 'SE5a' biplane fighters specifically designed to combat the German 'Zeppelin' airship threat. The first indigenous Vickers design to go into production at Weybridge was the 'FB5 Gunbus' family. The Gunbus was the World's first aircraft specifically designed to mount a machine gun. A superb flying replica was built at Weybridge in 1966 to commemorate the Centenary of the Royal Aeronautical Society and is now splendidly preserved in the RAF Museum at Hendon in North London. The Vickers 'Vimy' that followed in 1919 notably made the first-ever trans-Atlantic, South African and Australian aerial links during that same year - thereby opening up the key airlanes of the World as we know them today. A most impressive flying replica of the trans- Atlantic Vimy was also built at Weybridge in 1969 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the original trans-Atlantic flight by Alcock and Brown. This is now also displayed in the RAF Museum at Hendon,and the original aircraft is still to be seen in the Aviation Gallery of the Science Museum in South Kensington, Lodnon. From the Vimy stemmed a lineage of large military biplane bomber/ transports that formed the backbone of this capability in the Royal Air Force through most of the inter-war years. Additionally, and most notably, the cabin-type (eight-seat) 'Vimy Commercial' of 1922, which operated the first regular London-to-Paris air service, was dubbed 'The Father of the Airliner'. The advent of the monoplane generation at Weybridge in the 1930s - via the Barnes Wallis' geodetic structural principle initially realised in the Vickers 'Wellesley' - was the next really significant saga. Production of the immortal 'basket-weave'Wellington bomberthat followed numbered 11,460 units throughout the UK. Nationwide dispersal of production was obviously imperative to handle such a large high-rate production volume - and was also made necessary to very many local garages and similar places (including Woolworths store) in the Weybridge area following disastrous bombing of the Vickers' factory at Brooklands in September 1940. Soon overcome, the Weybridge plant itself, with the continued support of these'outstations', ultimately completed 2,514 Wellingtons. The 'Wimpy' was Britain's most prolific and successful two-motor bomber of World War Two, bearing the brunt of the bomber offensive during the early part of the war until the advent of the four-engined heavies, and serving in every Command of the Royal Air Force except 'Fighter'. The sole surviving example is today also prominently displayed at Hendon. THE CHANGING SCENE The Vickers aviation interests at Brooklands took on a significant new visual aspect with the erection of a new main office building in Brooklands Road in 1938. The 'Viking', 'Valetta', 'Varsity', 'Viscount', 'Valiant', 'Vanguard', 'TSR-2', 'VC10', 'Super VC10' and 'BAC One-Eleven' progression that emanated from Weybridge in the post-war years is well-known and well-recorded, and it is fair to claim that it is as impressive as it is unique in the Western World. In support of this, a hard runway was laid across the Brooklands site in 1948, a new design engineering block built at about the same time, new final assembly accommodation during the 1950s for the Viscount airliner and Valiant bomber that were simultaneously in peak production at that time, and huge new assembly halls for the VC10 and Super VC10 intercontinental jets in the mid-1960s. In the early 1960s, another major office block was also built in Brooklands Road as the administrative headquarters of the then newly-formed British Aircraft Corporation - which is today the administrative headquarters of the out-of-London activities of British Aerospace. The VC10 was, in fact, the last complete aircraft to be made and flown from Brooklands (to the nearby Wisley Flight Test Centre) and an important new work pattern emerged at Weybridge during the 1970s. With the progressive concentration of the aircraft manufacturing facilities on the Brooklands Road side of the site, the work pattern changed from the assembly of complete aircraft to an advanced multi-product multi-national overall work programme embracing major contributions to more than 10 UK, European and North American civil and military aircraft and smaller contributions to several more - thereby maintaining a broadly-based capability. In this, the Airbus A300, A310 and A320 family, Panavia Tornado, Sepecat Jaguar, the EAP, Harrier and Hawk, 146, ATP and 748,125, Jetstream, VC10 Tanker, BAC One-Eleven, Concorde and the (Rolls-Royce powered) Boeing 747 can all fairly and proudly claim to incorporate in one area or another the distinctive 'Designed and/or Made or Supported at Weybridge' label and enabled Weybridge to continue to operate in the forefront of both British and international aeronautical enterprise on a wide front. This programme has also been complemented by the supply of a vast range of spare parts on a 'round-the-clock' basis to support the several hundred earlier aircraft types in service throughout the World. Unfortunately, successive changes in Company structure and ownership, together with the harsh economic and market environment in which the Company is henceforth having to operate, have meant that, no longer having a prime product of its own, the extreme difficulty in maintaining an economically viable overall workload programme across this disparate spectrum is no longer possible at Weybridge. Sadly, therefore, the manufacturing and engineering facilities are being run down by the end of 1987 after almost exactly 80 years of a greater and wider involvement in the aircraft business than any other similar site in the World. However, this is no way attributed to any shortcomings in the ever proud and competent Weybridge workforce and certainly does not detract from the quite exceptional heritage, spirit and professionalism that they have always displayed in everything that they have tackled so energetically and effectively. UNIQUE ACHIEVEMENT In the eight decades of continuous and exciting Aviation activity at Brooklands, over 8,000 aircraft of very many types and origins have emerged from this uniquely historic site. Perhaps even more important, truly great people and ideas have ensured that the skill and the fame of Brooklands and Weybridge have been spread and respected throughout the World and will remain widely evident for many years to come.