Enviado por Jose M a través de Google Reader:
vía Ares de Bill Sweetman el 18/03/10
When Jetcal commented on an earlier post that the JSF was shaping up as a modern-day Breda Ba88 and I remarked that the Lince was an Italian Fairey Battle, less historically minded readers might have been confused, However...The Fairey Battle was not, as you might think, a brawl on Old Compton Street but one of Britain's less successful bombers. Resembling a scaled-up fighter, it looked fast in pre-WW2 publicity photos and was intended to survive by speed, with only a single .303 machine gun for rear defense.
There was one small problem. The Battle wasn't particularly fast. Rather like the 1980s 2.5-liter Camaro, the sporty styling wasn't matched by the power available. It was a lot bigger than a Hurricane or Spitfire but had the same engine - the first production Merlin - and at a very light weight on a good day the Battle could barely crack 240 mph. This was 110 mph slower than a Messerschmitt Bf109, with depressingly predictable results.
But the Battle and the twin-engine Blenheim were what the RAF had for tactical bombing in 1940. They were thrown against bridges and other targets as the Werhmacht advanced across France, and were cut to ribbons. The experience made the RAF very resistant to the idea of a high-speed bomber - and when they were offered the de Havilland Mosquito, which actually did fly fast and high enough to give defenders a problem, they were slow to take it up.
The first lesson is that if you're depending on one attribute for survival, be it speed or stealth, you'd better have enough of it.
However, there's another wrinkle to the Battle story. British aviation executive Sir Peter Masefield, in his autobiography Flight Path, writes that Richard Fairey and his team had designed the Battle around the company's own P.24 engine, twice as powerful as the Merlin and with an unusual feature: either of the engine's two banks of 12 cylinders could be shut down, together with one set of the contra-rotating propeller blades.
However, the Air Ministry considered that His Majesty had enough aircraft engine manufacturers and had no interest in adding another one. So the Fairey designers were not quite as stupid as one might think.
Second lesson: sometimes it is a bad idea to sacrifice capability for cost or commonality.
The P.24 did continue as an experimental program. It was tested on a Battle and (even more strangely) the combination was shipped to the US around 1941 and tested at Wright Field. More of that story here.
A request for any Ares readers at Wright-Patterson AFB: would you check the basement, or an abandoned hangar, or a vault with MAJESTIC-12 stencilled on the doors? If you find a rather ungainly single-engined bomber, or even a very peculiar-looking 24-banger engine, drop us an e-mail.
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