De Havilland Propellers
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| Industry | Aviation, engineering |
|---|---|
| Fate | Ceased aircraft equipment manufacture |
| Successor | Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Ltd |
| Founded | 1935 |
| Defunct | 1961 |
| Headquarters | , Bolton, Lancs. |
| Products | Propellers, fans, missiles |
| Parent | de Havilland Aircraft |
de Havilland Propellers was established in 1935, as a division of the de Havilland Aircraft company when that company acquired a license from the Hamilton Standard company of America for the manufacture of variable-pitch propellers at a cost of about £20,000. Licence negotiations were completed in June 1934.
de Havilland Propellers, Ltd., was incorporated on April 27, 1946, with the main headquarters at Hatfield as the centre of design, development and flight-testing, and with the main production plant at Lostock in Lancashire. The factory had been built in only nine months as part of the government's emergency pre-war shadow-factory programme.
Work on missiles began in the late 1940s, early 1950s at the Hatfield plant in facilities which had been used during the war for development and testing of aircraft propellers. By the early sixties, the company became Hawker Siddeley Dynamics which in turn became British Aerospace Dynamics, later BAe Systems (Guided Weapons Division) until closure of the site in 1990.
After the war, the company diversified; The first departure from the production of airscrews took place in 1950, when small-scale manufacture of electronic vibration-measuring equipment was started for sale to industry at large. These were the by-products of the vibration department, whose experience in electronics was, early in 1952, to provide the nucleus of a team which began the design of guided weapons: besides guided missiles, de Havilland Propellers undertook the manufacture of aircraft cold-air units, turbine-driven electric alternators, radar scanners, electronic equipment, plastic structures—even an experimental 80 ft windmill to derive electricity from the wind. In that year the company received a contract from the Ministry of Supply (MoS) for the development of a compact turbo-alternator to meet electrical power requirements of missiles developed by other companies. In the same year a second contract was received for the development of an infra-red homing head.
When these contracts had been successfully completed the M.o.S. awarded the company a development contract for a complete weapon system for an air-to-air missile with infra-red homing guidance. Originally under the project designation Blue Jay, later to be Firestreak. Production of the Firestreak was shared between all the U.K. plants of de Havilland Propellers:- Hatfield was responsible for design, research and development; Lostock manufactured a proportion of the weapon (the remainder being sub-contracted) and was also responsible for assembly and testing; Farnworth carried out manufacture and assembly of development rounds; and the factory at Walkden handled all production assembly. Woomera, Australia and Aberporth were used for test firing.
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