[Graham Boak]

[quote=Franek Grabowski;42132]Graham, please note Tempest II and Tempest V or Beaufighter family.


You could also add Wellington, or Sunderland, and I suspect others, to your list but by the start of WW2 it had stopped being the British habit to change the name of an aircraft just because the engine type changed. Given the rate of spend during WW2, economic/political influences were totally irrelevant on the choice of name, if it ever had been. Later, the Hunter, Buccaneer and Victor changed engines without a name change.

I can't think, offhand, of a single example of a British aircraft where the name was kept the same for economic/political reasons. The British system just doesn't work in that manner. It is much more an American habit, because of the US system of annual budget reviews passing through Congress and the Senate. Which might perhaps point the finger at the Harrier II, where a new name would indeed have been justified, but there the pressure would have been to go with the US name - it was 1942 when the British stopped giving aircraft different names than the US. And besides, the name Harrier had a particularly special cachet; perhaps like the Spitfire there was a popular/"political" reason but little to do with our democratic representatives.