One British company inherited the Spitfire, Concorde, the Comet and Marconi's radio firm
BAE Systems, formed in 1999, is the family tree of British engineering compressed into one firm. Its ancestors include Marconi's pioneering radio company, the makers of the Spitfire, the Comet jet airliner and the Harrier jump jet, and co-builders of Concorde, as well as the yards that built the Royal Navy's first destroyers and submarines.
The company was created on 30 November 1999, when British Aerospace bought Marconi Electronic Systems, the defence arm of the General Electric Company, for £7.7 billion. British Aerospace itself dated from 29 April 1977, when the government nationalised and merged the British Aircraft Corporation, Hawker Siddeley and Scottish Aviation. Marconi's roots went back to Guglielmo Marconi's wireless company, founded in 1897, and during the Second World War GEC helped develop the cavity magnetron for radar.
The merger almost did not happen this way. In the late 1990s, American giants such as Lockheed Martin and a combined Boeing and McDonnell Douglas left European firms under pressure to consolidate, and one British executive complained that Europe supported three times as many contractors on less than half the US budget. British Aerospace was negotiating a tie-up with Germany's DASA, but when GEC put its defence business up for sale in December 1998, it switched to buying its domestic rival instead. DASA went on to join France's Aérospatiale to form EADS.
The government keeps a special golden share, which among other things caps any foreign holding at 15%. Under chairman Dick Olver, appointed in July 2004, BAE turned decisively toward the United States, the largest defence market, and became the world's second largest maker of land systems. Later it bought cybersecurity firms as governments spent less on warships and tanks. In 2001 it closed the Avro regional jet line at Woodford, and the last of those jets was also the last British civil airliner.
Today BAE is Britain's largest manufacturer as of 2017 and, based on 2024 revenues, Europe's biggest defence contractor and the world's sixth largest. It works on the F-35, the Eurofighter Typhoon and several submarine classes.
Source: BAE Systems
