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Manufacturer, Armourer, Defence contractor, Engineering · Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom · 1908–present

Short Brothers

The world's first volume aircraft manufacturer, founded in London in 1908 by the three Short brothers and based in Belfast since 1948. Between 1965 and 1996 its Belfast works also built the Shorland — the turreted armoured patrol car on the Land Rover chassis, designed for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and exported to some twenty countries.

History

Short Brothers was formed in November 1908 at Battersea in London by Eustace, Oswald and Horace Short, who had been making balloons since 1897, and became the first company anywhere to undertake volume production of aeroplanes — building Wright Flyers under licence at Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey from 1909, then at Eastchurch, and from 1913 at Rochester in Kent, where its seaplanes and flying boats made its name. The Air Ministry pushed the firm into Northern Ireland in 1936, creating Short & Harland Ltd in Belfast as a fifty-fifty venture with the shipbuilders Harland and Wolff. Shorts built the Sunderland flying boat and the Stirling bomber through the Second World War, was nationalised under Defence Regulation 78 in 1943, merged its interests as Short Brothers and Harland Limited in 1947 and consolidated entirely in Belfast in 1948. The name reverted to Short Brothers in 1977 and the company became a plc in 1984. Later products included the Skyvan freighter and the Short 330 and 360 airliners, and — through Shorts Missile Systems — the Seacat, Blowpipe, Javelin and Starstreak missiles.

The armoured-vehicle line began in the early 1960s, when Frederick Butler of Short Brothers and Harland designed an armoured patrol car for the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the Series IIA Land Rover 109 chassis. The first production Shorlands reached the RUC in 1966. The turreted marks ran from the four-cylinder Mk1 through the Mk2 to the six-cylinder Mk3 of 1972 and the V8-engined Mk4 of about 1980, and by mid-1975 more than 400 had been sold to some twenty countries. Alongside them Shorts developed an enclosed armoured patrol vehicle without a turret — the SB.301 prototype of 1973, the production SB.401 of the Mk4 generation — and finally the Series 5 (S52 patrol car, S53 air defence, S54 anti-hijack, S55 personnel carrier), redesigned around the coil-sprung Defender 110 heavy-duty chassis and retaining about 85 per cent standard Land Rover components. More than 1,000 Shorlands of all marks had been built by 1982.

The aerospace business was sold to Bombardier Inc. on 7 June 1989 for £30 million, the UK government writing off £390 million of losses and injecting a further £390 million. Late in 1996 Shorts sold the complete Shorland light armoured vehicle line, together with the newer S600, to British Aerospace Australia, whose military vehicle capability passed to Tenix Defence Systems in early 1999; Shorland production is complete and the type is no longer marketed.

The Belfast company itself continues. Bombardier sold the aerostructures operation to Spirit AeroSystems in November 2020, and when Boeing acquired Spirit on 8 December 2025 the site became Short Brothers — A Boeing Company, employing some 3,500 people building primary structures, flight controls, nacelles and thrust reversers, with the Airbus-related production leased to Airbus.

Imagery

The Shorts Aerospace works in Belfast, photographed in 2008 under Bombardier ownership during the company's centenary year.
The Shorts Aerospace works in Belfast, photographed in 2008 under Bombardier ownership during the company's centenary year. Ross (geograph.org.uk), via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗
A Shorland Mk1 armoured car — the turreted Land Rover-based patrol vehicle Shorts designed for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and first delivered in 1966.
A Shorland Mk1 armoured car — the turreted Land Rover-based patrol vehicle Shorts designed for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and first delivered in 1966. geni, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗

Vehicles in this registry (2)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T04:48:16.011Z · status: researched