Fairey Battle
| Battle | |
|---|---|
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| Fairey Battle trainer | |
| Role | Light bomber |
| National origin | United Kingdom |
| Manufacturer | Fairey Aviation Company |
| Designer | Marcel Lobelle |
| First flight | 10 March 1936 |
| Introduction | June 1937 |
| Retired | 1949 |
| Status | 5 remain in museums |
| Primary users |
Royal Air Force Belgian Air Force Royal Australian Air Force Royal Canadian Air Force Free Polish Air Force |
| Produced | 1937–1940 |
| Number built | 2,185 |
 Compilation of period footage of Battles taking off and during flights
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Video of a Fairey Battle under restoration
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The Fairey Battle was a British single-engine light bomber designed and manufactured by the Fairey Aviation Company. It was developed during the mid-1930s for the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a monoplane successor to the earlier Hawker Hart and Hind biplanes. The Battle was powered by the same high performance Rolls-Royce Merlin piston engine that provided various contemporary British fighters, however the Battle was weighed down with a three-man crew and a bomb load. Despite being a great improvement on the aircraft that preceded it, by the time it saw action, the Battle was relatively slow, limited in terms of range and was quickly found to be highly vulnerable to both anti-aircraft fire and hostile fighters, possessing only two defensive .303 in machine guns.
The Fairey Battle participated in direct combat missions during early stages of the Second World War. During the "Phoney War", the type achieved the distinction of attaining the first aerial victory of an RAF aircraft in the conflict. However, by May 1940, the Battle had suffered heavy losses, frequently in excess of 50 per cent of sortied aircraft per mission. By the end of 1940, the type had been entirely withdrawn from active combat service, instead being mainly relegated to use by training units overseas. For an aircraft which had been viewed to possess a high level of pre-war promise, the Battle quickly became one of the most disappointing aircraft in RAF service.
In April 1933, the British Air Ministry issued Specification P.27/32 which sought a two-seat single-engine monoplane day bomber to replace the Hawker Hart and Hind biplane bombers then in service with the Royal Air Force (RAF). A requirement of the prospective aircraft was to be capable of carrying 1,000 lb bombs over a distance of 1,000 miles while flying at a speed of 200 MPH. According to aviation author Tony Buttler, during the early 1930s, Britain had principally envisioned that any future war would see France as its enemy and thus the distance to enable the bomber to reach Paris was a factor in determining the necessary range that was sought. According to aerospace publication Air International, a key motivational factor in the Air Ministry's development of Specification P.27/32 had been for the corresponding aircraft to act as an insurance policy in the event that heavier bombers were banned by the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference.
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Wikipedia