#manufacturer

Do you know how the Japanese aircraft industry was created? It was all about big industrial and financial conglomerates creating aircraft manufacturing branches, then adding design bureaus to them, finding suppliers and service partners etc. It was all very orderly, with very little room for rogue agents, dreamers or crazy ambitious schemes... but the Kawanishi aircraft company clearly didn’t get the memo. Founded by a bunch of geeks, this manufacturer proved to be extremely flexible: the history of the company is full of twists and turns, with many events that were simply not supposed to happen in the brutal market governed by big industrial conglomerates.

Even today, people are still arguing about the legacy of Alexander Sergeevich Yakovlev. Some praise him as an engineering genius, while others say that he was more of a ruthless ladder climber. Despite all that, one thing remains clear: there aren’t that many aircraft engineers that started their career with plywood biplanes… and retired with a legacy of jet fighters and jet airliners. Not many indeed.

In the middle of the 20th century, legendary designs like the Huey, the Cobra and the Mi-24 heralded the start of the new era, the era of helicopters: combat vehicles perfectly suited for the purposes of lightning-fast air support. New helicopter designs were being developed by superpower states as well as many other countries with advanced defence capabilities, like West Germany, France and, naturally, the United Kingdom… which is perfect, because today we’re going to speak specifically about British helicopters.

The Kingdom of Sweden has been famously neutral for most of the last two centuries. But even though the country managed to stay clear of big conflicts of the 199th century and remained largely neutral in WW1, its government still had to account for the possibility that Sweden might go to war in the future. That’s why, in the 1930s the kingdom was just as interested in developing their military capabilities as its neighbours. Given the situation in Germany, it was pretty clear that Europe was slowly steering towards a new global conflict. In the beginning, Sweden bought most of its aircraft abroad. But then there was a moment when they couldn’t get enough P-35s from the US, and after it, the government decided to support domestic production and development of military aircraft, and Saab was the company that rose to the challenge.