The Factory, as the Royal Aircraft Factory was known to the early aircraft manufacturers, came to Farnborough as the Army School of Ballooning which had been formed at Woolwich during the Boer War and then moved to nearby Aldershot before coming home to Farnborough with the formation of the Army Balloon Factory.
In the early days its mission was to try to impose safety standards on the reckless adventurers who were the first to take to the air. When the Wright Brothers succeeded with powered flight the army turned its attention to the marriage of aircraft and the internal combustion engine and the Royal Aircraft Factory was born.
All this came just in time for the First World War and initially the use of aircraft for reconnaissance. The Factory came up with designs alongside the commercial manufacturers and, as I suggest in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, played leapfrog with the Germans, and aeroplanes became ever more technically advanced. I write about this in my chapter on the First World War.
The interwar years presented something of a hiatus of aircraft design until re-armament began. The Factory was once again up with the pack in aircraft design.
After the Second World War, the British aircraft industry was vast but, unlike the Americans and Germans, relied too much on old technology. The Royal Aircraft Establishment as it had been renamed was tasked with the challenge of leading the drive to ever more advanced technology. We were at war, but it was a Cold War demanding a whole different approach.
In 1962 the Establishment employed 8,500 people including 1,500 scientists.
This remarkable team of people tackled a good number of knotty problems.
- jet lift and the control of vertical takeoff aircraft, culminating in the Hawker Harrier
- supersonic interception aircraft culminating in the English Electric Lightning
- the V bombers
- the enquiry into the Comet crashes to understand why it happened and how it could be avoided in future
- Concorde and supersonic transport, employing the wind tunnels to full effect.
The site comprised a range of buildings:
- Q121 24ft wind tunnel
- R133 Transonic wind tunnel
- R52 1916 wind tunnel building
- R136 11.5 ft x 8.5ft wind tunnel
- R178 Materials and chemistry building
- R51 Forge and Foundry
- Q120/Q146 Seaplane test tank
- R173 Romney buildings
- Q134 Weapons testing building
- Q65 The fabric shop
- Q170 Telephone exchange
- Q153 Structural test building
The site was decommissioned in 1998 and had been redeveloped as Farnborough Business Park. However the legacy was preserved to an extent in the air tunnel buildings owned by the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust, a museum in the Balloon Factory named Trenchard House and a massive portable airship hangar. There is of course the annual Farnborough International Airshow held at the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre.
Further reading:
Adam Wilkinson, Save Farnborough: The Cradle of British Aviation (London: SAVE Britain's Heritage, 2001)
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