Boulton Paul Aircraft

The Boulton Paul Association. — Tempus Pub Ltd, 1999. — 128 p. — (The Archive Photographs). — ISBN: 978-0752406251, 0752406256.Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd was a British aircraft manufacturer that was incorporated in 1934, although its origins in aircraft manufacturing began earlier in 1914, and lasted until 1961. The company mainly built and modified aircraft under contract to other manufacturers, but had a few notable designs of its own, such as the Defiant fighter and the Balliol trainer.
The company's origins date back to an ironmonger's shop founded in 1797 in Norwich. By the early 1900s, Boulton & Paul Ltd was a successful general manufacturing firm. The aircraft building business was sold off from the main construction business in 1934 and then moved to Wolverhampton under its new name Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd.
Following the acquisition of Dowty Aerospace by TI Group in 1992, and the subsequent merger of Smiths Industries and the TI group in 2000, to form Smiths Group, the Wolverhampton factory site was sold again in May 2007 to GE Aviation Systems. Yet again in August 2009 the factory was sold to Moog Inc. but was to move to new premises at the nearby I54 business park. The factory also had an on-site Boulton Paul Museum dedicated to Boulton Paul aircraft and the traditional methods used to manufacture aircraft. The important collection was scheduled to move to RAF Cosford in Spring 2013.