Shorts Aviation Company
The Shorts Aviation Company is located in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and is one of the oldest aircraft builders in the world. Short Brothers, almost universally referred to simply as Shorts, is a British aerospace company now based in Belfast. Shorts was the first true aviation company in the world, and was a manufacturer of flying boats during World War II. After the war they turned primarily to the production of cargo aircraft. In 1989, Bombardier obtained Northern Ireland-based Short Brothers (Shorts) from the British Government. Shorts, a manufacturer of aircraft as well as aerostructures, is a supplier to Boeing.
The American and European aviation industries began to develop within a few years of each other, but Europe took the first formal steps to establish dedicated aircraft companies in the early decades of the 20th century. During this time, there was a shift from aircraft designers, builders, and pilots all being the same people to having entrepreneurs who ran the business and built the planes and others who flew them.
Several of the firms who devoted themselves to the needs of naval aviation did excellent service as pioneers. The most distinguished of these was the firm of the Short brothers—that is, of Messrs. Oswald, Eustace, and Horace Short. The impulse of their work was scientific, not commercial. What would eventually become Shorts was formed in 1897 when Albert Eustace Short, and his younger brother Hugh Oswald Short, at the age of fifteen, took their first flight in a coal gas filled balloon. Their father had served his apprenticeship with Robert Stevenson. In a public library they came across that celebrated record of balloon voyages, Travels in the Air, by James Glaisher, and made up their minds to construct a balloon of their own. Success led them on step by step. In 1902 the two brothers started offering balloons for sale, winning a contract for three captive war balloons for the Government of India, and in 1906 they became the club engineers of the newly formed Royal Aero Club.
The reported successes of the Wright brothers in America shifted the interest of the club, and of the club engineers, from balloons to flying machines; in 1908 they built their first glider — a complete miniature Wright machine, without the power plant — for the Hon. C. S. Rolls. At about this time they were joined by the eldest of the three brothers, Mr. Horace Leonard Short, an accomplished man of science and a lover of adventure ; from this time onward the firm of the Short brothers never looked back. In 1908 they incorporated. After two unsuccessful planes, Albert obtained a license from Wilbur Wright in February 1909 to manufacture six licensed copies of the Wright Flyer aircraft that they built at Battersea in southwest London. This order made the Short company the first to produce a series of planes, rather than one of a model. Horace designed their first successful airplane, the Short biplane No. 2. In July 1909 they created Shellbeach Aerodrome on unobstructed marshland near Leysdown-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary, home of Lord Brabazon's Royal Aero Club, which had originally formed for ballooning. They sold six Flyers to this Club over the next two years.
They constructed, in 1909, the aeroplane on which Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon won the prize offered by the Daily Mail for the first all-British machine which should fly a circular mile. In 1910 they moved along with the Aero Club to larger quarters at Eastchurch 4km or so away, and built the Short-Dunne 5, the first tailless aircraft to fly. In 1911 they built the world's first twin-engine aircraft, the S-39 or Triple Twin. In 1913, they produced a seaplane with folding wings that allowed the plane to be parked on a ship.
They made the outer cover, gas-bags, valves, pressure-gauges, and controlling rudders for the first rigid airship constructed to the order of the Admiralty. Their early work was done at Shellness, the flying center for members of the Royal Aero Club, but in 1909 they moved their sheds to Eastchurch in the Isle of Sheppey, which thereafter became the flying centre of the navy. It was here that the first four naval aviators were taught to fly. The tale of the successes of the various Short machines would make something not unlike a complete history of early naval aviation. The first landing on the water by an aeroplane fitted with airbags, the first flight from the deck of a ship, the first flight up the Thames, not to mention many other incidents in the progress of record-making, must all be credited to the Short factory. The brothers held that the right way to advance aviation was to strengthen the resources of the aeroplane-designing firms, so that they might carry out their ideas without being dependent on Government demands, and the extraordinary success of the Short designs for aeroplanes and seaplanes did much to promote that creed.
Shorts built a variety of aircraft, and started to expand during World War I when they supplied the Short Admiralty Type 184 (or simply Short S.184). The S.184 became the first aircraft to sink a ship, when one flying from HMS Ben-my-Chree, hit a Turkish cargo ship in the Dardanelles during the Battle of Gallipoli. The S.184 was also sold to the Royal Flying Corps as the Short Bomber. The Seaplane 184 saw service until better heavy bombers came along and the Short was reassigned to reconnaissance duties. They also built a small number of land-based bombers.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s the only viable way to operate long-range civilian flight was by flying boat, as the necessary runway infrastructure was not widespread and would be too expensive to construct for the relatively small number of flights. Shorts took to the flying boat market and produced a series of three designs known as the Singapore. A Singapore I was made famous in 1927 by Sir Alan Cobham, when he, his wife, and crew made a survey of Africa while flying some 23,000 miles.
Shorts then started design work on one of their most famous designs, the Short Calcutta, based on the Singapore layout but larger and more powerful. The Calcutta first flew in 1928 and began active service with Imperial Airways in August. Two more were added to the fleet by April 1929 and flew passenger-preferred coastal routes from Genoa to Alexandria by way of Athens, Corfu, Naples, and Rome. A number of Calcuttas were used on shorter routes, and were instrumental in permitting long-range airline services between outposts of the British Empire. They followed the production of four Calcuttas with the larger Kent, following with a series of still larger aircraft designs such as the Short Empire, the first of which was launched on 2 July 1936 and the type was used by BOAC to operate the first transatlantic westbound service from Foynes, Ireland to Newfoundland on 5 July 1937.
They soon outgrew their factory at Eastchurch, and in late 1933 they opened an additional much larger factory at Rochester, about 15km to the west. In 1934 they closed their Eastchurch premises and purchased the Pobjoy engine manufacturers, with whom they had worked on their latest designs. In 1936 the Air Ministry formed a new aircraft factory in Belfast, forming a merger owned 50% each by Harland and Wolff and Shorts to become Short & Harland Ltd. The first product of the new factory was 189 Handley-Page Hereford bombers.
Their work on seaplanes eventually culminated in the Short Sunderland, a massive flying boat with enough range to operate as a transatlantic airliner. However the Sunderland was considerably more famous as an anti-submarine patrol bomber during World War II, where its long range and long flying time allowed it to close the air gap between Iceland and Greenland, helping end the Battle of the Atlantic.
It was their work on the Sunderland that also won them the contract for their ill-fated Short Stirling, the RAF's first four-engine bomber. If based on their original submission, essentially a land-based Sunderland with various cleanups, there seems to be no reason to suspect that the Stirling would not have been an excellent heavy bomber. Instead the Air Ministry stipulated a number of bizarre requirements of the plane, allowing it to double as a troop transport for instance, that eventually doomed it as newer designs outperformed it.
During the Battle of Britain the Rochester factory was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe and several of the early-run Stirlings and other aircraft were destroyed. In addition the Supermarine factory only a mile away was also almost completely destroyed. From this point on the Belfast factory became increasingly important as it was thought to be well beyond the range of German bombers. However, Belfast and the aircraft factory was subjected to German aircraft bombing during Easter week 1942. In 1943 the Government took over management of the Belfast factory, and merged Short Brothers with Short and Harland to form Short Brothers and Harland Ltd.
By 1947 all of their other wartime factories were shut, and operations concentrated in Belfast. In 1948 the company offices followed and Shorts became a Belfast company in its entirety.
In the 1960s Shorts found a niche for a new short-haul freighter aircraft, and responded with the Short Skyvan. The Skyvan is most remembered for its box-like, slab-sided appearance and equally rectangular twin tail units, but the plane was well loved for its performance and loading. Serving almost the same performance niche as the famous de Havilland Twin Otter, the Skyvan proved much more popular in the freighter market due to the large rear cargo door that allowed it to handle bulky loads with ease. Skyvans can still be found around the world today, notably in the Canadian arctic.
In the 1970s Shorts entered the feederliner market with their 330, a stretched modification of the Skyvan, called the C-23 Sherpa in USAF service, and another stretch resulted in the more streamlined Shorts 360, in which a more conventional central fin superseded the older H-profiled twin fins.
In 1977 the company changed its name back to Short Brothers, and in 1984 became a public limited company when the British government sold off its remaining shares. In 1988, loyalists working at the factory sold plans for a new missile system to the Apartheid government of South Africa in exchange for a large arms shipment which was then divided between the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and Ulster Resistance.
The British Government said 08 June 1989 that it would sell Short Brothers Ltd., the ailing Belfast aircraft and missile maker, to Bombardier Inc., the Canadian aerospace company, for $47 million. The announcement ended months of speculation over who would buy the state-owned company, which is Northern Ireland's largest employer, after the Government said it planned to privatize it. As part of the deal, the Government will inject $584 million into Short Brothers and write off a loan for $612 million that it made to Short Brothers earlier in 1989 year to help the company pay its debts. Under the agreement, the Short Brothers name was to be retained and the company was to be kept intact for the foreseeable future.
The company eventually lost its separate identity. In 1993 Bombardier Shorts and Thomson-CSF formed a joint venture, Shorts Missile Systems, for the design and development of very short-range air defence missiles for the UK Ministry of Defence and armed forces worldwide using expertise dating back to the 1950s. In 2000 Thomson-CSF bought Bombardier's 50% share to become the sole owner. Shorts Missile Systems was renamed Thales Air Defence Limited in 2001.
