Short Brothers was formed during the infancy of Aeronautics by the three brothers; Oswald, Eustace and Horace Short. Initially based in Rochester, they were manufacturers of Hot Air Balloons but famously obtained the first production contract in the world for 6 aircraft from the Wright brothers to build the Wright Flyer. Always at the forefront of innovation, they had many firsts including Biplanes, monoplanes, sea planes, bombers, military and civil transport aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. In recent times they were the Prime Contractor for the Mosquito Uncrewed System for the RAF Rapid Capability Office until its managed close.

This lecture covers the uncrewed part of the Shorts Belfast story which begins in the post Second World War period of Guided Weapons Design. Once weapons were designed, there came the need to demonstrate their capability against flying targets for Weapons Proving. The lecture looks at Shorts guided weapons from these early days, progresses through to the uncrewed Canberra aircraft used for weapons trials and goes into detail on SkySpy; a ducted fan uncrewed surveillance system developed in the early 1970s. The lecture then looks at Skeet; the small target aircraft used for proving of the Blowpipe, Javelin and HVM weapons, and Stiletto; a supersonic target dropped from a Canberra for proving ship based air defence missiles. Finally, a short summary of the Mosquito aircraft is provided.

Mosquito was to be the Uncrewed Air Combat System of the LANCA programme. Unfortunately, Mosquito is a classified programme so it is not possible to go into any details of the configuration or of its performance, so the focus is on the digital engineering approach used during its development.