AVIATION: First Air Lord

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 in 1940’s blitz, Sopwith’s Hurricanes bagged the lion’s share of the bombers. And when the Germans opened up with their V-1s, Sopwith Meteors (Britain’s first jets) went up to catch and shoot them down.

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 well enough to stake Sopwith to a sizable production order.

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.

In 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 it! I won’t have it!” The Skipper’s calm reply: “Why?” Designer Camm returned to his drawing board convinced. Says he: “When he asks you why and looks at you, you always find that there’s no reason why. If there is a reason why, he doesn’t ask.”

Balloons & Stunts. Tom Sopwith has been riding the clouds since he was 18, when he learned to fly a balloon. When the airplane came along, Sopwith taught himself to fly, and got Britain’s 31st aviator’s certificate at 22.

He got the money to start his company through stunts. He was the first to fly the Channel from west to east, won a £4,000 prize. He cleaned up $28,000 in prize money at air shows in New York, Chicago and Boston, was the first to fly over Philadelphia. With his winnings, in 1912, he started Sopwith Aviation Co. in a roller-skating rink. Sopwith sketched planes with chalk on the walls and floors, soon settled on a design for a biplane, the Tabloid. But orders were slow at first, and weekends he let skaters use the plant so he could make ends meet.

Pups & Snipes. When World War I broke out, Sopwith was ready. His plant grew from 100 workers to approximately 2,000, in four years turned out more than 16,000 Pups, Camels, Snipes, etc. for the allies. At war’s end, Sopwith tried to keep going with motorcycles, toys and pots & pans, but failed. Finally, after a voluntary liquidation, his company re-emerged as H. G. Hawker Engineering Co., named for Australian Harry Hawker (later killed in a test flight), who had helped design Sopwith’s planes. The new company kept going on foreign business and new contracts from the R.A.F. and the British Navy. By 1934 Sopwith was strong enough to take in Hawker’s rival, Gloster, in a merger. The next year, he bought control of the Armstrong Siddeley Development Group, put all his eggs into one corporate basket.

Sopwith has kept Hawker Siddeley’s 25 divisions autonomous in their day-to-day operations. The group’s strength lies in the dovetailing of production schedules, training schools to produce skilled workers and a central research body shared by all. Sopwith worries about the fact that Britain has plenty of prototype planes, but few in big production. But Sopwith is already looking forward to the day of pilotless airplanes, and whenever anybody questions their feasibility, he asks him his favorite question: “Why?”

*U.S. Engine Builder Pratt & Whitney makes the same claim for its J57 engine (TIME, May 28, 1951). No U.S. fighter big enough to mount the J57 has yet been ordered by the Government.

† So named as the eighth child born to parents of seven girls.

*The leading companies and some of their best-known past & present products: Hawker Aircraft (Hurricanes, Tempests, Typhoons); Gloster Aircraft (Gladiators, Meteors and soon, the new Javelins); Armstrong Whitworth (the Whitley bomber, first to hit Germany in World War II); Armstrong Siddeley Motors (Siddeley autos, “Mamba” plane engines); A. W. Hawksley (prefab houses, and now tooling up for the Javelin); an alloys company; A. V. Roe (Lancaster bombers and the Anson reconnaisance plane).