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Aviation History
1951
1951 - 0343.PDF
FERRY^TO AMBASSADOR. ^ ^ vJv) ^— A Record of Airspeed Achievement Over Twenty Years THE Airspeed Ambassador is known as an aircraft ofmany virtues, not the least of which is that of beingagreeably different from its contemporaries. And so it was with its forebears. Almost without exception these founders of the 20-year-old Airspeed tradition were, in one respect or another, unorthodox in design; all were endowed with fine flying qualities and unusually good operating economy. The story of their development, and of personali- ties and events which influenced their careers, is told here for the first time. It would have been an assiduous reader, or one with a keeninterest in commercial developments, who might have spotted the unobtrusive paragraph in Flight of March 27th, 1931, tothe effect that a new limited company had been formed under the title of Airspeed, Ltd. Behind the cold formality of theannouncement was a story which began when work ceased on the R.100 and when the technical staff concerned with that greatairship were obliged to look around for positions elsewhere. Most of them were able to secure work with various aircraftfirms; but two had previously decided to go one better and to establish their own company. They were Mr. N. S. Norway,formerly chief calculator to Sir Dennistoun Burney's Airship Guarantee Company, and the chief engineer, Mr. A. HessellTiltman, who had also, for some years, been a designer with the de Havilland Aircraft Company. Lord Grimthorpe becameinterested in the project, Sir Alan Cobham joined the board of directors and, with the help of a number of enthusiasts, thecompany was duly established in a small way, with offices and works at Piccadilly, York. The first-born was Type AS-1—a single-seater sailplane ofhigh performance and great beauty, which was named the Tern. It won high praise, even from some of the most experiencedGerman pilots, and an example existed, we believe, as recently as 1948. But the AS-1 was not quite the first aircraft to beconsidered by the firm in its embryo. Tiltman and Norway had originally decided to try to form the company because theybelieved that there was a market for a " different" light aircraft and had gone quite a long way in the work of designing a high-wing three-seater cabin machine. With the limited funds avail- able, however, the sailplane seemed to be the better initialproject. Soon afterwards Sir Alan Cobham stated that he was ready to buy two multi-passenger aircraft, which were the nextto be completed. They bore the type-number AS-4 and the name Ferry. As already intimated, Airspeed transport machines have never slavishly conformed to the fashion of the day, and though the Ferry was the most motherly-looking of three-engined biplanes, it was nevertheless an aircraft with a difference. The cynic might admit the truth of this by virtue of the fact that, for good practical reasons, two of the engines were upright (Gipsy Us) and the third inverted (Gipsy III). But the real character of the Ferry lay in its having been planned specifically as a short- range transport or joy-rider, with the requirements of Sir Alan Cobham's National Aviation Day Display foremost in mind. It was described by Messrs. Norway and Tiltman as having "a large cabin and a small petrol tank," and it was designed to carry ten or more passengers on a total of 360 h.p.—or, in other terms, 36 h.p. per paying passenger. As a passenger aircraft it possessed a psychological advantage over competitors in having three engines, for twenty years ago, as now, many aerial aspirants would fly happily behind multiple power plants, but would hesitate to entrust themselves to a single-engined machine. Ten months or so after design work had started, the first
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