Juan de la Cierva 1895-1936

Juan de la Cierva, born on September 21, 1895, in Murcia, Spain, was an aeronautical engineer who invented the autogiro, an aircraft that combined the capabilities of a conventional airplane and the helicopter.

He was interested in flight as a teenager and experimented with gliders with his friends. After receiving his engineering degree, in 1918 he built the first trimotor airplane. Its crash in 1919 after a stall convinced him that aviation safety called for stall-proof aircraft that could make steep takeoffs and landings at slow speeds. He decided that only the wing and not the body should be used to maintain lift. He began experimenting with rotating-wing aircraft in 1920 and developed the autogiro as a more stable form of aircraft. His first attempts with rigid rotors were unsuccessful. He then applied the idea of mounting the blades to the hub of the rotor on hinges so they could flap. This would equalize lift on advancing and retreating sides of the rotor while in forward flight.

His first successful flight with the autogiro took place on January 9 1923. The craft was equipped with a conventional propeller for forward flight and an articulated, or hinged, air-powered rotor blade that could be adjusted to balance lift. This technical breakthrough was necessary for the successful development of the helicopter, which ironically, replaced the autogiro around the time of World War II.

Cierva moved to England in 1925. His aircraft were further developed by the Cierva Autogiro Company of Great Britain, as well as by U.S. and various continental companies. They were used widely in France, Germany, Japan, and the United States until World War II, when the helicopter replaced them. Cierva died in an airplane crash on December 19, 1936, near London.

Robert McIntyre 1900-1987

Born in Port Glasgow in 1900, the family moved to Port Chalmers, in New Zealand a few years later where he attended Otago Boys High School along with his brothers. Towards the end of the First World War, the family returned to Scotland and took up residence in Prestwick. Bob, and his younger brother, Alan, were indentured as Marine Draughtsman at the Irvine Shipyard. It was during the time in Prestwick that Bob became interested in Aircraft - the Royal Flying Corps were using the old Ayr Race Course as a flying field and a Sopwith Camel force landed on the gold course near their Prestwick home. Later Bob moved with the family to Larne in Northern Ireland were he worked at the Olderfleet Shipyard.
In the 1920's Short Brothers of Rochester, Kent, had moved into the building a series of military and civil flying boats and bob moved to Rochester and worked on the design of the Singapore Flying Boat. A few years later Bob moved to Hawker Aircraft at Kingston and contributed to such famous names as the Fury and the Hind. In the early 1930's he was the Chief Draughtsman of the Project Design Office and working on the prototype Hurricane fighter. When Sydney Camm, later Sir Sydney, the Chief Designer was taken seriously ill, Bob found himself in charge of the project. Whiles working on the developments of the Hurricane, he was also involved with the prototypes of the Typhoon and Tempest fighters.

In 1942 Bob was suddenly 'invited' to become Chief Designer at Scottish Aviation. An empty house was commandeered under the emergency powers for him and his family and he was amazed to find it was only two hundred yards from the old family house on Monkton Road where he had lived as a teenager. In 1943 Bob found himself flying to America as part of the British
Commission negotiating for the supply of bombers and fighters for the RAF. Scottish Aviation was to play a vital role in ensuring that the American aircraft would be modified to the requirements of the RAF.

At the end of the war, Scottish Aviation seized upon the opportunity to convert ex-military aircraft for civil use. The contacts Bob had made in America proved vital in quickly securing the necessary drawings and approval of the American manufacturers to the proposed modification and changes. Under his guidance the design staff at Prestwick modified aircraft such as the Dakota.

Bob always made it clear that the success of the Prestwick Pioneer and the Twin Pioneer was the result of team work by the entire design team and everyone else at Scottish Aviation. He always played down his own part as the leader of the team.

In 1956 the Royal Aeronautical Society honoured Bob's contribution to aeronautics and made him an Honorary Fellow.

Proffesor R.V Jones CH CB CBE FRS 1911-1997

Reginald Victor Jones, CH CB CBE FRS was an English physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in World War II.
Born in Herne Hill, Jones was educated at Alleyn's School, Dulwich and Wadham College, Oxford where he studied Natural Sciences. In 1932 he graduated with First Class honours in physics and then, working in the Clarendon Laboratory, completed his DPhil in 1934. Subsequently he took up a Senior Studentship in Astronomy at Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1936 Jones took up the post at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, a part of the Air Ministry. Here he worked on the problems associated with defending Britain from an air attack.
In September 1939, the British decided to assign a scientist to the Intelligence section of the Air Ministry. No scientist had previously worked for an intelligence service so this was unusual at the time. Jones was chosen and quickly rose to become Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science) there. During the course of the Second World War he was closely involved with the scientific assessment of enemy technology, and the development of offensive and counter-measures technology. He solved a number of tough Scientific and Technical Intelligence problems during World War II and is generally known today as the "father of S&T Intelligence".

He was briefly based at Bletchley Park in September 1939, but returned to London in November. He decided that the Oslo report received in 1939 was genuine, though the three Service Ministries regarded it as a "plant" and discarded their copies: "... in the few dull moments of the War, I used to look up the Oslo report to see what should be coming along next
Jones's first job was to study "new German weapons" which were believed to be under development. The first of these was a blind bombing system which the Germans called Knickebein. Knickebein, as Jones soon determined, used a pair of radio beams which were about one mile (1.6 km) wide at their point of intersection. German bombers flew along one beam, and when their radio receivers indicated that they were at the intersection with the second beam, they released their bombs.

At Jones's urging, Winston Churchill ordered up an RAF search aircraft on the night of 21 June 1940, and the aircraft found the Knickebein radio signals in the frequency range which Jones had predicted. With this knowledge, the British were able to build jammers whose effect was to "bend" the Knickebein beams so that German bombers for months to come scattered their bomb loads over the British countryside. Thus began the famous "Battle of the Beams" which lasted throughout much of World War II, with the Germans developing new radio navigation systems and the British developing countermeasures to them.
As far back as 1937, R. V. Jones had suggested that a piece of metal foil falling through the air might create radar echoes. He, and Joan Curran, were later instrumental in the deployment of "Window"; strips of metal foil dropped in bundles from aircraft which then appeared on enemy radar screens as "false bombers". This technology is now known as chaff and contrary to the popular belief, was also known to the Germans at the time. Both parties were reluctant to use it out of fear that their enemy would do the same: this delayed its deployment for almost two years.

Jones also served as a V-2 rocket expert on the Cabinet Defence Committee (Operations) and headed a German long range weapons targeting deception under the Double Cross System.
n 1946 Jones was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, which he held until his retirement in 1981. He did not want to stay in Intelligence under the proposed postwar reorganisation. During his time at Aberdeen, much of his attention was devoted to improving the sensitivity of scientific instruments such as seismometers, capacitance micrometers, microbarographs, and optical levers.

Jones was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1942, for the planning of a raid on Bruneval to capture German radar equipment (Churchill had proposed that Jones should be appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) but the head of the Civil Service Sir Horace Wilson threatened to resign as Jones was only a lowly Scientific Officer, and the CBE was a compromise[2])[3][4]; he was subsequently appointed CB in 1946;[5] and Companion of Honour (CH) in the 1994 Queen's Birthday Honours.[6] He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965, and received an honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen in 1996.

His autobiography, Most Secret War: British Scientific Intellige nce 1939-1945, formed the basis, pre-publication, of the BBC One TV documentary series "The Secret War", first aired on 5 January 1977, in which Jones was the principal interviewee.In 1993 he was the first recipient of the R. V. Jones Intelligence Award, which the CIA created in his honour

Walter Herschel Beech 1891-1950

Walter Herschel Beech began an illustrious career in aviation with a solo flight on July 11, 1914, in a Curtiss pusher. A rated Army aviator and flight instructor in 1917, he barnstormed after his enlistment ended in 1920, finally joining the Swallow Company in 1923, where he quickly rose from designer, salesman, and test pilot to general manager. In 1924 he co-founded Travel Air with Clyde Cessna , which would become the world's largest producer of both monoplane and biplane commercial aircraft, internationally acclaimed for establishing more than 200 performance records. With the merger of Travel Air and Curtiss-Wright, Beech became president of the new corporation.

However, he desired a more personal participation in aircraft design and manufacture and so co-founded Beech Aircraft Company with his wife, Olive Ann, on April 1, 1932. His early Beechcrafts set many distance and speed records, and won the Bendix and McFadden races. Most novel among these, with design and performance features years ahead of its time, was the Model 17 "Staggerwing" cabin biplane.

During World War II, Beech turned the entire production of his company to defense, producing more than 7,400 military aircraft. His AT-71/C-45 trained more than 90 percent of the USAAF navigator and bombardiers and 50 percent of its multi-engine pilots.
In the postwar years Beech again applied his efforts to producing a new line of light aircraft, the most famous of which was the V-tailed Bonanza

Lawrence 'Larry' Dale Bell 1895-1956

Lawrence Dale Bell was first involved in aviation in 1913 when he worked as a mechanic for two exhibition pilots: his brother, Grover Bell, and Lincoln Beachey. Employed by Glenn Martin in late 1913 as a factory worker, and in mid-1914 he had produced his first aircraft during his off-hours, a Martin tractor converted into a bomber for sale to Mexican rebel Panco Villa. This so impressed Martin that Bell was made superintendent of the new factory.

Bell left Martin in the late '20s to join Consolidated, becoming their Vice-President and General Manager in 1929. When the company was moved to San Diego, he elected to remain in Buffalo and, with several others from Consolidated, to form the Bell Aircraft Co in 1935. Initial work came as subcontracts from other manufacturers, but as Bell's ideas focused more on research and development, the company came into its own. His concept of the Airacuda as a multiplace, cannon-bearing, long-range fighter was quite novel for the time, and was followed by the P-39 Airacobra as a full production plane, for which the company expanded to meet wartime contracts in the US and abroad.

For years Bell had been interested in rotary-wing aircraft, and in 1944 met Arthur M Young, who had devoted many years to helicopter research. Bell set him up in a shop and spent many hours with him developing plans, from which the successful line of Bell helicopters came. And when Bell Company was invited to submit a proposal for a plane to attack the sound barrier, he told his engineers to "throw away the book" and start fresh—in such an experiment he insisted that no prior aircraft design ideas or practices should be allowed to hamper creative imagination. The resulting X-1, the USAF's first rocket-propelled flight research vehicle for NASA, was first to exceed the speed of sound.

Clyde Cessna 1879-1954

At age 31, after witnessing an aerial exhibition in Kansas that sparked his interest in aircraft, Clyde Vernon Cessna began his lifelong dedication to aviation. He designed and built his own aircraft and taught himself to fly. Those qualities of courage and self-reliance not only made him successful in aviation, but also served to inspire his associates throughout the industry.

Following World War I, the widespread interest in private flying induced him, in 1925 to found, with Walter Beech, the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita KS. With Cessna as its president, the company became one of the leading U S aircraft manufacturers, and his advanced design concepts produced a line of internationally famous aircraft that established many speed and distance records.

In 1927, he formed the Cessna Aircraft Company, and in the decade of the 1930s produced racing and sports aircraft that set traditions of safety, performance, and economy which are still the standards of safety for aviation. His aircraft introduced the pleasures of private flying to many thousands of pilots throughout the world. Cessna returned to his farm to spend his later years in Rago KS.

Paul F Cullerne 1918-2005 (Aviation Photographer)

Paul Cullerne left the Air Force in 1946 as a Sergeant Photographer and spent part of his War service at RAF Nassau. On leaving the Air Force, he took up photographic work for Messrs A V Roe and Company Ltd then HSA and BAe, retiring in the early '80s.