Word: sopwiths
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Britain last week showed off a delta-wing plane, the Gloster Javelin, which its builder thinks is the fastest, longest-range, all-weather day & night fighter ever built. Nobody needed to guess who the builder was. It was T. O. M. Sopwith, the first lord of British aircraft and a big name in British aviation for nearly 40 years. When Germany's top World War I ace, Von Richthofen, was finally shot down, Canada's ace Captain Roy Brown, in a Sopwith Camel fighter was credited with the kill; when the Germans came back...
...Sopwith also turns out the Sapphire jet engine, whose 8,300-lb. thrust (at sea level) makes it, so the British claim, the world's most powerful in production.* And his new Gloster Javelin is the first fighter strong enough to use the full power ot these big engines. In test flights last week, the Javelin shot from the ground to higher than 30,000 ft., outrunning the sound of its own screaming jets. All its performance data is still carefully kept secret. But the R.A.F., which is thriftily chary of building anything but prototype planes, liked the Javelin...
Rockets & Autos. That sort of confidence was nothing new to 64-year-old Thomas Octave† Murdoch Sopwith. He is master of the Empire's biggest aircraft, engine and auto complex: the Hawker Siddeley Group. Its twenty-five divisions and 60,000 workers make everything from air frames for fighters and bombers to rockets, engines and luxury Siddeley automobiles for the dowager trade.* It has ?40 million in assets, 31 plants scattered throughout Britain and Canada, and last year netted ?2.6 million after taxes...
...spite of Hawker-Siddeley's size, Tom Sopwith runs it by remote control. He spends most of his time hunting, fishing and boating because he thinks better out in the open than behind a desk. Though he goes to the office only once or twice a month, and leaves most administrative details to Managing Director Sir Frank Spriggs, 57, Sopwith makes the big policy decisions himself, chewing over the problems while tramping the moors of his 20,000-acre estate, in Yorkshire...
Before developing the Sapphire and the Javelin, Sopwith faced two major decisions: 1) should the engine's compressor be axial flow or centrifugal?; 2) should the plane be delta-winged or twin-boomed (like the U.S.'s old P-38)? He chose axial flow, even though Sir Frank Whittle, who pioneered jets, advised the other; Sopwith thinks the Sapphire proved his own judgment right. His choice of delta-wing at first shocked Sopwith's crack designer, Sydney Camm, who dashed off to Yorkshire to seek "The Skipper," crying: "I won't have...