Weir W-1
prototype sport autogyro built in the UK in 1933
The Weir W-1 was a prototype single-seat autogyro built in the UK in 1933. It is also known as the Cierva C.28, because the autogyro concept was licensed from Cierva, who assigned it a designation.
Design
The W-1 had a stubby, cigar-shaped fuselage; a monocoque plywood structure with an oval cross-section. It had a cruciform tail with the fin and rudder extending above and below the fuselage, and with large end-plates creating a triple tail. The two-blade rotor was carried on a cantilever pylon, and was provided with a shaft that took power from the engine for pre-rotation. The W-1 was an early "direct control" autogyro, where the flight controls altered the attitude of the rotor disc, so the aircraft had no ailerons for directional control. A piston engine in the nose drove a tractor propeller. It had tailskid undercarriage, and an open cockpit for the pilot.
Development
The firm of G. & J. Weir (today, the Weir Group) is a Glasgow-based shipbuilder. On 6 July 1932, family and board member James Weir proposed funding a new autogyro design, to be commissioned from Cierva.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Weir W-1” is prototype sport autogyro built in the UK in 1933. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Weir, prototype and sport, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q60982349. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1933 and 1932.
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This entry incorporates text from “Weir W-1” 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.