Normalair

Westland Aircraft designed Britain's first aircraft cabin-pressure control equipment in 1941, for the high-altitude Welkin, and on 15 March 1946 Normalair Limited was established on the Westland site at Yeovil to continue the work when Westland turned to helicopters, with Ted Boulger as general manager. It made cabin-pressure regulators and oxygen regulators, at first under AiResearch and Bendix licences, and by 1954 had its head office and works at West Hendford, Yeovil, a London office in Westminster and subsidiaries in Toronto and Heidelberg, Victoria. Normalair supplied the oxygen sets for the 1953 Everest ascent, equipped the Viscount, Britannia and Comet, employed 1,050 people in 1961 and 1,100 by 1962, and added Bendix hydraulic servo valves and an Industrial Electronics Division in 1960.

The Land Rover product came from Normalair's Industrial Division, whose head office and works were at North Hyde Road, Hayes, Middlesex, the former Fairey Aviation town where Westland had taken over Fairey's aircraft business in 1960. The 'Normalair Air Conditioning' leaflet, approved by the Rover Co. Ltd and received by the AA technical library on 27 January 1964, promised 'cool comfort at the flick of a switch': the installation turned the interior of a Land-Rover into a cool refuge from heat and humidity, with three levels of temperature reduction selected as low, medium or high, and was pictured on a Series IIA 109 station wagon.

In 1966 the Garrett Corporation of Los Angeles took a 48 per cent shareholding, the rest remaining with Westland, and the company was renamed Normalair-Garrett Limited (NGL), then with more than 1,300 employees; the operating company of that name was incorporated on 19 September 1967 and the 1946 company became Normalair-Garrett (Holdings). NGL won the Queen's Award for export in 1968, took over its competitor Teddington Aircraft Controls in 1971, formed a filtration division in 1976 and began aircraft data recorders for the F/A-18 Hornet in 1977. Both companies were renamed Honeywell Normalair-Garrett in May 2000, and the Yeovil works is now Honeywell Aerospace Yeovil; the 1967 operating company is recorded by Companies House as in liquidation.