Garrett AiResearch was a manufacturer of turboprop engines and turbochargers, and a pioneer in numerous aerospace technologies.

[9] Boeing's B-17 bombers, credited with substantially tipping the air war in America's and Great Britain's favor over Europe and the Pacific, were outfitted with Garrett intercoolers, as was the B-25.

By the end of World War II, AiResearch engineers had developed air expansion cooling turbines for America's first jet aircraft, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star.

During World War II, Garrett AiResearch sold $112 million in military equipment and had as many as 5,000 employees.

[13] Having to scale back its workforce to just 600 employees at the end of the war stimulated Garrett to look for new revenue sources.

A way had to be found to cool cockpits so jet pilots could endure the heat generated by air friction at supersonic speeds.

With the Navy order for [an on-board engine] self-starter, [by 1951] Garrett Corp. [had] a $120 million backlog, enough to keep 5,500 workers on three shifts busy for at least the next three years".

"In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Garrett was heavily committed to the design of small gas turbine engines from 20 - 90 horse power (15 - 67 kW).

The engineers had developed a good background in the metallurgy of housings, high speed seals, radial inflow turbines, and centrifugal compressors".

property was increasingly constrained by the demand for development of commercial space near the fast-growing Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

At that time, 2,000 people worked at the facility "and Garrett was ranked one of the top three aircraft accessory manufacturers in the world".

[16] In 1959 ground was broken for construction of an additional facility at 190th Street and Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance, California.

[21] In the 1960s, AiResearch Environmental Control Systems provided the life supporting atmosphere for American astronauts in the projects Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab.

Following the first phase of the Caterpillar project, Garrett turbochargers saw wider use on earth-moving equipment, in tractors, stationary powerplants, railroad locomotives and ships.