Sopwith Aviation

The Sopwith Aviation Company later Sopwith Aviation & Engineering Company was a British aircraft company that designed and manufactured aeroplanes mainly for the British Royal Naval Air Service, Royal Flying Corps and later Royal Air Force in the First World War, most famously the Sopwith Camel. Sopwith aircraft were also used in varying numbers by the French, Belgian, and American air services during the War.

In April 1919 the company was re-named Sopwith Aviation & Engineering Company Limited. In September 1920 the company entered voluntary liquidation after a move to build motorcycles failed. The patents and assets were bought by a new company H.G. Hawker Engineering .

The Sopwith Aviation Company (based at Brooklands) was created in June 1912 by Thomas Octave Murdoch (Tommy, later Sir Thomas) Sopwith, a well-to-do gentleman sportsman interested in aviation, yachting and motor-racing, when Sopwith was only 24 years old. Following their first military aircraft sale in November 1912, they moved to the company's first factory premises which opened that December in a recently closed roller skating rink in Canbury Park Road near Kingston Railway Station in South West London. An early collaboration with the S. E. Saunders boatyard of East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, in 1913, produced the Sopwith "Bat Boat", an early flying boat with a Consuta laminated hull which could operate on sea or land. A small factory subsequently opened in Woolston, Hampshire in 1914.

During the First World War, the company made more than 16,000 aircraft. Many more of the company's aircraft were made by subcontractors rather than by Sopwiths themselves. These included Fairey, Clayton and Shuttleworth, William Beardmore and Company and Ruston Proctor.