As
the ocean liner plowed through the choppy North Atlantic, a morose and
dispirited Flight Lt. Frank Whittle lounged about on the deck, wondering how it
had all gone wrong. He had come up with a brilliant design, surely, for aircraft
propulsion, but why did nobody in the RAF or industry want to back him? He'd had
some initial interest, but the money soon dried up and the RAF had demanded he
return to a more lucrative field of endeavour, namely, being a flight officer.
After losing most of his own money, and much of various partners, Frank Whittle
was not looking forward to being posted as a line pilot, even though he'd been
promised one of the new Hurricane squadrons everyone was so eager to join. But
not Frank, in fact, he'd become totally obsessed with jet engines, and spent
much of his time doing drawings and trying to convince others he knew what
he was talking about, and in the end, suffered a nervous breakdown and was
placed on medical leave. Unable to face family in the UK, he made his way to the
USA...which is how he wound up looking at the stormy North Atlantic in the fall
of 1937....
His second cousin lived in upstate New York, far removed from the busy worlds of
European military affairs, or so Frank thought. It turned out their neighbor was
a designer at Bell Aviation, which in the fall of 1937 was desperately trying to
break into the lucrative business of supplying new fighters to the USAAC. He too
was frustrated by the lack of vision in the higher echelons: he wanted to
supercharge the engine so it would operate at high altitude, but the upper
management of the Air Corps failed to see the need for that capability. One
blustery day, Frank was over at the neighbors playing Gin Rummy and was asked if
he knew anything about airplane design, specifically, turbocharging; Frank not
only knew, he'd been planning for years to replace the reciprocating engine with
something more powerful, yet lighter: Jets!
Taken onto the Bell Design Group as an "associate designer", Whittle
began to incorporate his knowledge with some serious American investment.
Roosevelt had begun ramping up production for the military, and Bell dropped out
of their attempt for a new fighter to privately fund a new, amazing plane: The
P-52A AiraMamba.
Using the basic P-39 Airacobra fuselage and wing, instead of a mid mounted
inline engine it now sported a mid mounted axial flow jet engine. Frank Whittle
had realised early on that the axial flow engines were the best for low drag and
smaller aircraft, and with the vast resources of Bell Aircraft behind him he
could research at a level unheard of in the UK. With a crash program started in
early 1938, by the summer of 1939 Bell was already producing aircraft for the
USAAC and the RAF, who despite their initial skepticism, had been persuaded to
buy several squadrons worth of these fast planes by Lord Beaverbrooke. Kept
secret, their initial debut was to not happen until summer, 1940...over Kent.
Click on
images below to see larger images
We
of course are all familiar with the stories of how these little
interceptors, along with Spitfires and Hurricanes, turned back the Nazi
tide in the Battle of Britain, and how the utter destruction of the
Luftwaffe bomber fleets, and their fighter escorts, so badly damaged
Germany's ability to wage war that the Army overthrew Hitler in 1941 and
sued for peace. What is little known is how close it came to never being
built.
The AiraMamba ushered in jet engines into the RAF, and it also introduced
the .50 caliber gun as an aircraft weapon in the RAF. Concerned with the
high closing rates afforded by the jet fighter, Bell designers added 2 .50
caliber guns to the nose of the plane, allowing much higher damage per hit
than the rifle calibre .303 guns preferred by the RAF. After a few initial
combats, most of the experienced pilots had the outer .303s removed, and
more ammo was carried for the .50s. They were amazingly lethal against the
He-111s and the Do-17s, and soon were adopted as normal guns for Spitfires
and Hurricanes. This was to be fortuituous, with events unfolding in Aisa...but
that's another story.
Here we see an RAF AiraMamba about to take off on Sept 2, 1940, on one of
its' first operational sorties. The extreme short duration of the plane,
due to the thirsty nature of the Allison J-2 engine caused the AiraMambas
to be based very close to the southern coast, and on 30 second alert for
many weeks during 1940. Few were ever caught on the ground, as they
"climbed like a scalded angel".
The Kit:
Classic era Monogram P-39 with some surgery. Lopped off the wingtips, added a
exhaust nozzle from plastic tubing, intakes from a T-33 (Academy I think) and
the nose was faired in using a large bomb from an F-84. The windscreen was from
a P-51, and the canopy was made by carving a balsa master and heat forming a
clear section. Decals are from Aviagraphics, very nice indeed, and slipper tanks
are resin aftermarket from the spare bin.
The little people are from the Eduard 1940 RAF crew set.
Alvis 3.1
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