The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 20 Vorige editie

The shapely Westland Whirlwind twin-engined fighter showed great promise in 1940, but was let down by its engines — right? Wrong! It wasn’t the engines at all — instead it was a few millimetres of propeller-blade thickness. Matt Bearman turns the conventional wisdom on its head and reveals how an astonishing oversight scuppered the aircraft’s future. Talking of conventional wisdom, we continue our coverage of 1957’s Defence White Paper with an appraisal of the RAF’s historical attitude to unmanned aircraft — which, contrary to popular myth, had always been one of keen interest; so was it that big a surprise when Duncan Sandys decreed “no more manned fighters”? Unmanned air defence certainly came into its own for the French when faced with Libya’s Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder bombers in neighbouring Chad in the 1980s, as detailed in our dramatic account of the often-suicidal missions undertaken by the Soviet-built bombers’ Libyan crews. Also in this issue: Heathrow Airport in the late 1940s; American aviator Charles F. Blair; a hair-raising Boeing 707 flight to Mogadishu; Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor; the Breguet Atlantic crash at the 1968 Farnborough airshow; Hawker Sea Hawk; Sikorsky S-38B, and an in-depth look at a 1939 plan to fit an early Whittle jet engine into an Avro Anson! — all illustrated with high-quality archive photographs and bespoke artwork.