Aviation Traders

History

Frederick Alfred Laker was born on 6 August 1922 in Canterbury, Kent, the son of Frederick Henry Laker and Hannah Laker (née Todd). Leaving school at 16, Laker began work at the Short Brothers in Rochester. In 1941, he joined the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Demobilised, he became one of the first employees of British European Airways, but soon moved to London Aero and Motor Services (LAMS), a company whose business was the conversion of Halifax bombers for use as transport aircraft. These aircraft were flown by an air charter company called Payloads which was associated with LAMS.

Laker left LAMS in 1947 to set up Aviation Traders Ltd (ATL) at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, to trade in war-surplus aircraft and spares, but his company struggled for lack of capital and he also continued to fill in as Payloads’ chief engineer. Realising that Payloads was close to bankruptcy, Laker advised the owner, Bobby Sanderson, to sell out, and helped by finding a buyer for the company’s Haltons. In return for this favour, Sanderson lent Laker £38,000 with which to buy twelve second-hand Haltons from the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). It was these aircraft, plus the spares which came with them, plus the opportunity to put both to profitable use, which set Aviation Traders on its feet. In 1949 Laker shifted his fledgling business to new premises at Rochford aerodrome (later Southend Municipal Airport) near Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

Aviation Traders (Engineering) Ltd, ATL's engineering division, was formally established in 1949. ATL initially specialised in converting numerous war-surplus bombers and military transports into freighters, particularly for the Berlin Air Lift. When the airlift ended in 1949, Laker turned his skilled engineers to the business of scrapping warplanes. Huge quantities of all types were on offer at prices as low as £50 each, at which price a profit could be made simply by reclaiming the metals from the airframes and engines. In 1951, he acquired Air Charter, a moribund company with useful tax losses and Fairflight, whose principal assets were its surviving Avro Tudors and a contract to carry freight between Berlin and Hamburg when the Russians blockaded Berlin once more in 1951. Having also acquired BOAC’s three Tudors, Air Charter rapidly became the dominant airline on the ‘little Berlin airlift’, running 70 flights per week.

Also in in 1951 ATL won a contract from Bristol Aircraft to manufacture wing centre sections for Bristol Freighters. With this, ATL grew into a large engineering and manufacturing organisation. In 1953 Laker bought the entire stock of 13 Tudor aircraft held by the Ministry of Civil Aviation, with an eye to converting all the Tudors for military trooping and contracts. Laker recruited Lionel ‘Toby’ Heal from Hunting-Percival, but, as far as the Tudor was concerned, Heal’s efforts were unsuccessful. Although the systems suspected of causing the Tudor accidents were either removed (pressurisation) or re-designed (hydraulics), the ministries remained unconvinced. After further modifications to improve cargo access, also by Heal, Laker’s Tudors were mainly used as freighters.

Lionel Heal had brought with him his patented ‘tensioned skin’ system of construction, which required the aircraft’s fuselage to be designed so that its outer skin curved in two directions at once, both round its circumference and along its length. This concept was introduced into ATL's first, and only, completely new design, the ATL-90 Accountant, one of many post-war aircraft seeking to be a successor to the then ubiquitous Douglas DC-3. Eventually the tension skin concept was dropped in favour of an unstressed skin conventionally riveted to the aircraft’s bulkheads and stringers. By then, however, the Accountant, had been decisively shaped by Heal’s tension skin system, thus ensuring that the aircraft had all the disadvantages of the system and none of the advantages. The Accountant was designed for 28 passengers but, competing against the Avro 748, Handley Page Dart Herald, Fokker Friendship and YS-11, proved unsuccessful.

Air Charter had been granted an unrestricted passenger certificate in 1954 and began operating car-ferry services the same year, using Bristol 170 Freighters. In 1956 the car-ferry division became a separate company known as Channel Air Bridge. In 1958 Laker announced his decision to sell both ATL and Air Charter to Airwork, the deal becoming effective in January 1959, when both companies joined the Airwork group. Under government pressure, Airwork, merged with Hunting Clan in 1960 to form British United Airways, with Laker emerging as managing director. As Executive Director of British United Airways, Laker had to make Channel Air Bridge profitable since he demanded it set separate during the Air Holdings consolidation and the Bristol Freighter could not handle the projected increase in traffic. There were few options, purchase an existing aircraft, design a new aircraft, or modify an existing aircraft.

Laker determined that modification of the existing DC-4 was the only cost effective solution. Twenty-one Douglas DC-4 airliners were converted into car ferries as the ATL-98 Carvair, the prototype conversion first flying on 21 June 1961. Initially, it was thought that second-hand, pressurised DC-6 and DC-7 airframes could be converted into larger, "second generation" Carvairs within 15 years of the original DC-4-based Carvair's entry into service, but this failed to materialise.

Aviation Traders remained under Airwork in the Air Holdings group until 1976, when the company moved to Stansted and AT(E)L had become Britavia. In 1990, Britavia and Airwork design offices were amalgamated to become the Britavia devision of Airwork and the company finally disappeared in 1993 when Airwork was acquired by Short Brothers.

The Aviation Traders name was revived in 1996 when it became a separate company and still exists today as an aircraft design engineering consultants based at Bournmouth Airport.

Sir Frederick Alfred Laker died on 9 February 2006 in Fort Lauderdale, Broward, Florida, USA.

Company References

1. The Flight of the Accountant: a Romance of Air and Credit, Flight to Insolvency, P. Armstrong (University of Leicester, 2005)
2. The ATL-98 Carvair, William Patrick Dean (McFarland and Company, 2008)