The Cierva Autogiro Company
was a British firm established in 1926 to develop the autogyro.
The company was set up to further the designs of Juan de la Cierva,
a Spanish engineer and pilot, with the financial backing of James
George Weir, a Scottish industrialist and aviator.
History
Juan de la Cierva's first British-built autogyro was the C.8
design. It and some other designs were built in conjunction with
Avro. The pre-war Cierva C.30 proved popular. Nearly 150 were
built under licence in the United Kingdom by Avro, in Germany
by Focke-Wulf, and in France by Lioré-et-Olivier.
On 9 December 1936, Cierva was
killed in the Croydon KLM airliner accident when the aircraft
in which he was a passenger crashed after taking off in fog.
Dr. James Allan Jamieson Bennett was promoted to Chief Technical
Officer of the company and remained in the position until leaving
in 1939. In addition to making important contributions to autogyro
controls while at Cierva Autogyro, Bennett carried through with
Cierva's decision to offer the Royal Navy an aircraft capable
of true vertical flight. Bennett's innovative design, a new type
of rotorcraft that combined key features of the autogyro and
helicopter, was tendered to the Air Ministry (Specification S.22/38)
as the Cierva C.41 Gyrodyne, but preliminary work was abandoned
with the outbreak of World War II. Bennett joined Fairey Aviation
in 1945, where he continued the development of the C.41 design
to create the first gyrodyne, the Fairey FB-1, that first flew
in 1947. In 1943, the Aircraft Department of G & J Weir Ltd.
was reconstituted as the Cierva Autogiro Company to develop helicopter
designs for the Air Ministry. The post-war Cierva Air Horse was
at the time (1948) the world's largest helicopter.[citation needed]
The first prototype of the Air Horse crashed killing Alan Marsh,
Cierva's manager and chief test pilot John "Jeep" Cable,
Ministry of Supply Chief Helicopter Test Pilot, and J. K. Unsworth
the Flight Engineer. This led Weir to cease further investment
in the company and its development contracts were transferred
to Saunders-Roe |
