Fairey Aviation Company
1915-1977 aerospace and engineering company
The Fairey Aviation Company Limited was a British aircraft manufacturer of the first half of the 20th century based in Hayes in Middlesex and Heaton Chapel and RAF Ringway in Cheshire that designed important military aircraft, including the Fairey III family, the Swordfish, Firefly, and Gannet. It had a strong presence in the supply of naval aircraft, and also built bombers for the RAF.
After the Second World War, the company diversified into mechanical engineering and boat-building. The aircraft manufacturing arm was taken over by Westland Aircraft in 1960. Following a series of mergers and takeovers, the principal successor businesses to the company were FBM Babcock Marine, Spectris, and WFEL (formerly Williams Fairey Engineering Limited).
WFEL was bought by German arms manufacturer Krauss-Maffei Wegmann in 2013 for £60m, and is now called KNDS UK.
History
Founded in 1915 by Charles Richard Fairey (later Sir Richard Fairey) and Belgian engineer Ernest Oscar Tips on their departure from Short Brothers, the company first built under licence or as subcontractor aircraft designed by other manufacturers. The first aircraft designed and built by the Fairey Aviation specifically for use on an aircraft carrier was the Fairey Campania a patrol seaplane that first flew in February 1917. In the third report of the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, reported in Flight magazine of 15 January 1925, aviation figures prominently. C. R. Fairey and the Fairey Aviation Co. Ltd, was awarded £4,000 for work on the Hamble Baby seaplane.
Fairey subsequently designed many aircraft types and, after World War II, missiles.
The public source identifies “Fairey Aviation Company” as 1915-1977 aerospace and engineering company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Fairey, Aviation and Company.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1393142. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2013, 1915 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fairey Aviation Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.