BAE Systems (1910s): Ancestor firms

The English public file is split: Typhoon as a European industrial politics, the Queen Elizabeth-class carrier as a yard-and-alliance story, and the Al-Yamamah / Serious Fraud Office years as the export-ethics hearing. Richard Evans, John Weston, Mike Turner, Ian King, and Charles Woodburn are the successive public chiefs. Margaret Thatcher's privatisation of British Aerospace (1981-85) is the political preface.

Korean contact is thinner than Lockheed's: Hawk trainers and later teaming stories, not a whole ROK fighter generation. Compare Rheinmetall and Hanwha for the land-systems export boom that BAE watched from a different specialism. Intensity is low; duration is long because the ancestor works are Victorian-to-present.

A nationalised industry that learned to lobby BAE is what remains when a state aircraft industry is privatised, merged, and then asked to live on exports and a US foothold. de Havilland, Avro, Vickers, and the 1977 British Aerospace grouping are the catalogue. Barnes Wallis sits in the Vickers memory more than in the 1999 brand book.