Placing the Fairey Battle.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Some aircraft were failures like the Whirlwind, Typhoon, Manchester, Bf210, and He177. But they were and never are called obsolescent.

You really have a thing about the Typhoon, don't you? But I thought we'd had that argument. The Battle had a slight problem in taking a three-man crew and a bomb-load aloft on one Merlin. The crew-to-engines ratio was all wrong if later experience is anything to go by. I don't know what "more powerful engine" you had in mind for the Battle in 1939/40, though.

The whole "ill-conceived" vs. "obsolescent" argument just seems like semantics to me. The aircraft in question proved not be a lot of use in the war that actually happened. Some had development potential, some didn't; some found other roles, some didn't.

BTW: I've seen the Swordfish described as "obsolescent" often enough but it did pretty well, didn't it? I do sometimes wonder how Fairey came to turn out so many ungainly-looking aircraft: Swordfish, Battle, Barracuda, Albacore, Fulmar...