William Beardmore & Co

 
In 1913, pre-empting The Great War, William Beardmore & Co ventured into aircraft production, building Sopwith Pup aircraft at Dalmuir under licence.
Later, a shipborne version of the Pup - the Beardmore W.B.III - was designed in-house. A hundred of these aircraft were produced and delivered to the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). The company built and ran the Inchinnan Airship Constructional Station at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire. It produced the airships R27, R32, R34 and R36.

Beardmore obtained a license to build German DFW biplanes to be powered by Beardmore-built Austro-Daimler engines, and built large numbers of aircraft under sub-contract during war.

In 1924, the company acquired a licence for stressed skin construction using the Rohrbach principles. An order for two flying boats using this construction idea was placed with Beardmore. It had the first aircraft built for it by the Rohrbach Metal Aeroplane Company in Copenhagen, building the second itself and they were delivered to the RAF as the Beardmore Inverness. In addition, a large, experimental, all-metal trimotor transport aircraft was designed and built at Dalmuir and delivered to the Royal Air Force as the Beardmore Inflexible. Beardmore produced a line of aircraft engines, including the Cyclone, Meteor, Simoon, Tornado (used in the R101 airship), Typhoon and Whirlwind.

Under the leadership of G. Tilghman Richards, produced original aircraft, including the W.B.III, a redesigned Sopwith Pup with folding wings and folding or jettisonable landing gear. Designed and built a small number of civil and military aircraft in the interwar years.