WW1 aircraft

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Great pics in here guys.

I find it interesting that the major players of WWI aircraft companies were next to nonexistent by the 1939-`945 show. Sopwith, SPAD, Fokker, although through mergers ect. I sure they soldiered on. I'm sure you lot can expand my knowledge on that as I really don't have a good handle on what happened to a lot of those manufacturers between the wars.
 
Plus there wasn't a very clear path forward for how civil aviation would evolve. For example, Handley Page tried to develop air transport routes in South Africa using converted O/400 heavy bombers. The commercial venture lasted about 9 months before it folded...despite some early efforts to leverage advertising (at least one of their O/400s was painted with "Commando Brandy" written on the rear fuselage and under the wings.

Manufacturers of small aircraft, particularly fighters, had a more challenging time because there simply wasn't a demand for their products any more. The surplus of ex-military training machines added to the problems faced by manufacturers. Simply put, there was very little demand signal for new airframes in the immediate postwar years.
 
Sopwith had to close down as a going concern partly because of the turndown in demand and partly because of a fine imposed on it by the government for making excess profits during the war.
However it morphed into Hawkers when Tom Sopwith and Harry Hawker set up a new company and the rest as they say is history
 
French aircraft industry failed to modernise its production techniques. Aircraft tended to be built by hand made means rather than automation. Productivity fell through the floor as a result.

In desperation France to embark on a series of nationalisation and forced amalgamations for established aircraft manufacturers. Nieuport was one of those companies. in 1937-38 adopted a nationalised aircraft manufacture conglomerate known as SNCAO, injecting govt money and vastly rationalising French a/c manufacturing. This program vastly improved the situation, but it was all far too late to alter the situation for France in 1940.

The final aircraft developed by Nieuport saw much of its development done by successor companies. In 1932, as a result of the amalgamations taking place in the French aviation industry, Delage retired and Nieuport-Delage was briefly renamed Nieuport again, before merging with Loire Aviation to form Loire-Nieuport, The Nazi invasion in 1940 saw the company's records burnt to prevent their falling into German hands. This step didn't prevent the Germans from charging several employees with espionage, as the last operational Nieuport, the LN401 was a single-seat, single-engine retractable-gear monoplane dive bomber with an inverted gull wing and a vague similarity to the Ju87.
 
Actually, a surprising number of British aircraft manufacturers survived the transition to peacetime: Avro, Armstrong Whitworth, Beardmore (although aviation was more of a sideline than a primary business), Blackburn, Boulton Paul, Bristol, Fairey, Gloster, Handley Page, Parnall, Shorts, Vickers and Westland.

As previously noted, Sopwith went under but re-emerged as Hawker Aviation. Similarly, Airco went into liquidation but its assets became the De Havilland Aircraft Company in 1920. Pemberton-Billing Ltd became Supermarine shortly after the war, perhaps in an attempt to distance the company from the awful aircraft designed by it's founder Noel Pemberton Billing.

Companies that went under included British Aerial Transport, Grahame-White Aircraft Co., Martinsyde, Tarrant Ltd, and the White & Thompson/Norman Thompson Flight Company.
 
I should have added something for the French aircraft industry. A big factor in the demise of their companies was their 'excess profits" legislation introduced from 1916.

SPAD is probably a good illustrative example of what happened in France after 1918. Post-war the company became Blériot-SPAD. The first of its designs to be known by this name was Bécherau's SPAD XX biplane. First flown in 1918, the SPAD 20 was not delivered until 1920. The return of peace meant orders were small; only 93 were built.

The return of peace also meant that the company had to face the problem of dealing with its liabilities under the Excess Profits Act of 1 July 1916. As modified in 1917, this imposed an 80% tax rate on almost all "excess profits". The calculation and collection of the tax was a controversial issue, and very large amounts were still outstanding as late as 1940, when the German occupation rendered the whole question irrelevant. With the future uncertain, SPAD was fully incorporated into the Blériot organisation in 1921, and the company effectively disappeared, although a number of Blériot types were marketed as SPADs.
 
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