The Rise of Supermarine

Much of the initiative for the formation of Pemberton-Billing Ltd as a manufacturer of flying boats had come from Hubert Scott-Paine – as later events would make fairly clear. In his youth he and his brothers had built small speed boats at Shoreham in Kent and he had an affinity with the sea and a love of speed. Much of the organisation of Billing’s yacht charter business, including the recruitment and management of the yacht crews, had been in Scott-Paine’s hands. Furthermore, many years later, Scott-Paine wrote a letter to Flight claiming that the design of the Supermarine P.B.1, with its sleek monocoque-style hull, had been his work and this was not refuted by Billing.

The business had been in a dire state when Billing left to join the RNAS; no sales had been made, funds had been depleted through the purchase of stock from defunct aircraft businesses, notably Radley Gordon-England, several workers had left to join the forces and the remainder could not be paid until Billing’s business partner, Alfred de Broughton, agreed to inject more money into the company.

Scott-Paine now rose to the challenge. A far better manager and negotiator than Billing had ever been, he used his contacts and skill to acquire contracts to repair damaged military aircraft and this proved just sufficient to keep the business afloat. He was also successful in obtaining further contracts from the Admiralty Air Department (A.A.D) to build both a seaplane and a flying boat of their design. Billing’s return had thrown a slight spanner in the works as some resources were shifted to pursue his ideas on air defence fighters, but that had come to an end when he departed, leaving Scott-Paine free to forge a closer link with the A.A.D. It was a partnership that would provide a firm foundation for the new company.

Once he had full control, Scott-Paine promptly discarded the increasingly tainted PembertonBilling name and instead used that which had been applied to the works; henceforth it was to be the Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd. With new contracts in place, the workforce could be expanded and newly-qualified engineer William Abraham Hargreaves was employed as chief designer in the first weeks of 1916.

Supermarine was now in close contact with the A.A.D aircraft design team, headed by Harris Booth and Harold Bolas, and this included naval architect and hull designer Linton Chorley Hope. One of the first contracts acquired by the company in late 1915 was for the construction of a small batch of A.D. Flying Boats. This was an experimental two-man machine designed primarily to evaluate Hope’s monocoque-style hulls, a type derived from his extensive experience with the design and construction of racing yachts and motor launches. The first batch of hulls, however, would be constructed not by Supermarine but by Southampton-based shipbuilders May, Harden and May, part of George Holt Thomas’ expanding Airco group. Supermarine was responsible for the detail design and construction of the flying surfaces and for final assembly, under the supervision of A.A.D staff.

Hope’s hulls were constructed in two parts; the main body, typically cigar-shaped, and the boat-like lower surfaces that provided stability and smooth running on the water, known as the planing bottom. The main structure was designed to distribute static and shock loads to avoid local concentration of stress, the construction allowing for a small degree of flexibility. It was made by shaping thin wood stringers and hoops around a jig of lateral formers and then applying the skin as thin, narrow planks, usually of mahogany, butted together.

This process was labour intensive and required skilled woodworkers to produce a watertight hull. The planing bottom was then attached to the completed main hull structure, thereby creating a double skin and sealed buoyancy chambers. The curved shape of the bottom surface was designed to let the flying boat run smoothly, to minimise bow-wave and spray, and to increase the angle of incidence of the aircraft as it approached take-off speed and then rose clear of the water. Experience both with high speed launches and early marine aircraft demonstrated that the planing bottom would perform better if it terminated with a clean step at the rear, usually vertical, which broke the water surface tension force resisting the take-off of the aircraft. It was also usual to have a small secondary surface and step towards the rear of the hull for the same purpose.

As Hope’s construction techniques for aircraft were still experimental, the hull of one of the third batch of A.D. Flying Boats was allocated for strength testing at the Royal Aircraft Factory. Between September and November 1917 it underwent a series of tests to check distortion under various loads, which were minimal, and it was then inverted in a sand bed and the planing bottom loaded with bags of lead shot until, under a load of 13,800lb or about 8.8lb per sq inch, the hull began to collapse around the cockpit aperture. This form of hull construction had therefore proven to meet all the claims for distribution of stress and high strength made by Hope and his supporters.

While work progressed at Woolston on the A.D Flying Boats, other contracts awarded to the company covered construction of a large patrol seaplane designed by the A.A.D, the A.D. Navyplane, and both Short 184 seaplanes and

Norman Thompson NT2B flying boat trainers. There was much from which an alert and competent design team could learn.

Supermarine’s first flying boat – the Baby

The company’s first opportunity for a complete inhouse design came in early 1917 with the issue of Admiralty Specification N.1(b) calling for a Single Seat Marine Fighter. Supermarine’s submission was the Baby, a pusher biplane flying boat with a 24ft hull, 6ft shorter than that of the A.D. Flying Boat but of similar cross section. Its design was led by Hargreaves and heavily influenced by the work already carried out by the company with and for the A.D.D, particularly with regard to the Linton Hope hulls.

A contract was awarded to the company for three examples and they were allocated the registrations N59, N60 and N61. N.59 flew in February 1918. It is not entirely clear whether Supermarine had built any of the Hope hulls for the later batch of A.D. Flying Boats or whether this was to be their first attempt at one, but the company certainly implied in later years that they had indeed built some.

Meanwhile, the first A.D. Flying Boat had run into serious handling problems on the water,