Emergency fighter

An emergency fighter is an aircraft designed or adapted for use as a fighter during an emergency period in war. While useful as a broad concept or definition, it is not easy to make the category of emergency fighter clear cut, as many aircraft designs are produced under pressure in wartime, and aircraft which were hastily adapted for use as fighters may then go on to have a mainstream career.

The crisis which gives rise to an emergency fighter may have been the sudden outbreak of war, which resulted in a country lacking sufficient fighter aircraft. This was the case for Australia at the beginning of the Pacific War in World War II; with both the UK and the USA committing its production capacity to supplying their own needs, they had to create their own indigenous design resulting in the Commonwealth Boomerang.

An emergency fighter may also have been produced to meet a need for a particular sort of fighter aircraft. For instance, Britain’s Royal Air Force used hastily converted Bristol Blenheim light bombers as twin engined heavy fighters. A materials shortage arising in the course of conflict may have led to experiments with new kinds of fighters, like the Finnish VL Humu, which was based on the American Brewster F2A Buffalo, but with a higher proportion of wood in its construction.

Emergency fighters were also designed to a tight time scale in a crisis situation, in the hope that a new aircraft might be able to change a nation’s fortunes. Most famous of these was undoubtedly the Heinkel He 162 jet aircraft of Germany.

Many examples of the emergency fighter concept date from the Second World War. In that global conflict, situations of strategic national emergency arose in several nations due to total war. At the same time, fighter design was still sufficiently simple that an aircraft designed and produced in a matter of months had some chance of being effective.

Some emergency fighters were aircraft designed for other purposes but pressed into service to meet an immediate need. In early 1942 eight Australian CAC Wirraway trainer and general purpose military aircraft were used to intercept a Japanese raid on Rabaul, with disastrous effects when all the defenders were shot down. Some Russian Sukhoi Su-2 light bombers were used as fighters during the opening days of Operation Barbarossa when nothing else was available.

...
Wikipedia