Airspeed Limited was established in 1931 to build aeroplanes in York, England, by A. H. Tiltman and Nevil Shute Norway (the aeronautical engineer and novelist, who used his forenames as his pen-name).

A glider was able to fly in two or three months while the design office and workshop was being set up in half of an empty bus garage, on Piccadilly in York.

[3] In March 1933, the firm moved to Portsmouth where the City Council gave generous terms for a factory building constructed to Airspeed's requirements at the local airport.

Managing director, Nevil Shute, wrote that they could come back to Airspeed and as an "obsolescent type" might not be so easy to sell again.

He got a reputation as "unscrupulous" for resisting the auditors' attempt to write them down on the books because, with growing talk of war, civil aircraft of any size would "sell immediately".

As the six were worth nearly twenty thousand pounds, writing them down to half that would add £10,000 to their loss, making the firm's proposed share issue a very unattractive investment.

Shute found Fokker to be "genial, shrewd and helpful" but "already a sick man", and difficult to deal with because "his domestic life was irregular".

Shute and a Fokker representative "who was well accustomed to methods of business in the Balkans", spent three weeks in Athens but did not close the deal.

After a year, the drift to war, and their Air Ministry contracts, meant that the Dutch could not go to the Airspeed factory or board meetings.

[13] In June, 1940, formal announcement was made that the de Havilland Aircraft Co., Ltd., had completed negotiations for the purchase from Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson, Ltd., of that firm's holding of Airspeed ordinary shares.

Around 1943, presumably to reduce the risk of Luftwaffe bombing, a new dispersed design office was opened at Fairmile Manor in Cobham, Surrey; little is known of this establishment and nothing survives there today.