In 1910, the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company Limited was founded by Sir George White, his brother, and his son. He wasn't an aviation enthusiast; he just saw a lot of money in the future of aviation. He had already made a lot of money through his chairmanship of the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company. (Bristol is on the west coast of England, where the Severn River empties out into the Bristol Channel. Wales is on the other side.)

The company's products were known as "Bristol", and jumping ahead a little bit in 1920 a new company called the Bristol Aeroplane Company Limited was formed to take over the assets of British and Colonial.

Their first product was the Bristol Boxkite of 1910. This was essentially a wooden skeleton with some fabric over the wings, and an engine. It was relatively successful in terms of sales as a trainer, but there was nowhere to go with the design beyond that. From then until the First World War the company and its chief designer Frank Barnwell (1880-1938) worked on new designs, including some secret designs for naval aircraft. When the war broke out, Barnwell went off to fight in Europe but was quickly repatriated when it was evident that his value as a designer was much greater than his value as a pilot. In the meantime by 1914 the company had produced a single seater, biplane fighter of sorts called the Bristol Scout. I say "of sorts" because as I mentioned in past commentaries, the ability to shoot forward through the propeller did not come about until 1916 so the ability to attack the enemy was rather limited.

2 major things happen for the company in 1916. The first was that Sir George died, and his son Stanley took over the business. The second was that they developed a new 2 seater biplane fighter called the Bristol F.2A, which was unsuccessful, and its successor the F.2B which was very successful. In fact, the F.2B wasn't intended to be a fighter (as evidenced by the fact that it was a 2 seater) but rather an reconnaissance and artillery observation aircraft to replace the B.E.2 that we met a few photos ago. For some reason it was rarely called by its name and just referred to as "the Bristol Fighter". So what does that have to do with this aircraft?

After the war, it seemed wasteful to ignore all the developments that had been made in the previous few years. Since it was a 2 seater, the "Bristol Fighter" was redesigned as the Bristol Tourer. Part of this involved adding a canopy for the rear seat. (Or seats; some models had 2 passengers sitting side-by-side though I suspect that may have been even more cramped than cattle class in a Qantas 737.) These were known as coupes.

What we see here is a replica of the Type 28, the 2nd variant of this aeroplane as a civilian aircraft. You can see the covering over the rear cockpit. More specifically it is a replica of an aircraft with the registration G-AUDK. (This was before Australia got its own VH aircraft registrations in 1929, and we still used Mother Britain's.) The real aircraft belonged to Western Australian Airways, which was founded by World War I pilot Norman (later Sir Norman) Brearley (1890 to 1989) in December 1921. It was based in Geraldton Western Australia. (That's a town about halfway between Perth on the west coast of Australia, and the bit of Australia that juts out furthest to the west before the coast swings back in a north-east direction.) In late 1921, it started the first scheduled airline service in Australia, flying between Perth and Geraldton.

The plaque next to this aircraft replica states that it was created to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the first regular transport flight in Australia and the first long-distance air mail flight in the world, so it would have been built around about 1991 or 1992, probably. (The description is ambiguous. The airline had a subsidised air mail contract between Geraldton and Derby (over 2000 km further north-east along the Western Australian coast) which was awarded in 1921, and that may well be the "long-distance" referred to. On the other hand it wasn't until 1928 that the airline was awarded the first interstate air mail contract (Perth to Adelaide), which might also be regarded as the first truly long-distance one although it's only a couple of hundred kilometres more than to Derby.)

The replica was created "unskinned" on one side to show off (rather well) the internal construction.

Oh, what happened to Western Australian Airways? In the mid 1930s it failed to secure any subsidised routes so in April 1936 it was bought by Adelaide Airways Ltd which had been formed only a year earlier as a subsidiary of the Adelaide Steamship Company. Only a few weeks after it bought Western Australian Airways, Adelaide merged with other companies to form Australian National Airways. In 1957 ANA merged with Ansett, with Ansett-ANA (the ANA bit was later dropped) becoming the de facto second domestic airline in Australia for the 1960s to the 1990s. Ansett went bust in 2001. Perhaps not coincidentally, though, Ansett was one of the contributors to the construction of this replica. (As was one "Maurice Brearley' who I suspect has more than a casual connection with the aforementioned Norman.)

Addendum: My personal opinion is that Facebook is a sociopathic organisation that steals other peoples' intellectual property (including the images in this gallery) despite being explicitly denied permission to do so.