Brewster Aeronautical

Company History: The Brewster Aeronautical Corporation was a North American defense contractor that operated from the 1930s until the end of World War II.

It started existence as an aircraft division of Brewster & Co., a company that originally sold carriages and had branched into automobile bodies and airplane parts. In 1932, James Work, an aeronautical engineer, bought the division for US$30,000 and created the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation. Brewster started out making seaplane floats and wing panels, but with the hire of chief engineer Dayton Brown it embarked on its own designs. It operated three aircraft plants, at the Brewster Building in Long Island City, New York, Newark, New Jersey, and, in 1941, in Warminster Township, Pennsylvania, which was then known as NAS Johnsville.

Brown's first design, in 1934, was a two-seat scout-bomber, the Brewster SBA, which first flew in 1936; subsequently the Naval Aircraft Factory built them, with the designation SBN-1. The Brewster SB2A Buccaneer was a follow-on design that first flew in 1941 and was also ordered by the Royal Air Force, who named it the Bermuda.

A design in 1936 for a carrier-capable monoplane resulted in the Brewster F2A (named Buffalo by the British), which was chosen over an early version of the Grumman F4F Wildcat. The F2A prototype handled well in 1938 tests, and the Navy ordered 54. However, production was slow, at least partly due to an inefficient factory in Queens, New York. The Navy ended up ordering Wildcats, which by 1938 had been greatly improved.

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