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Aviation History
1941
1941 - 0043.PDF
JANUARY 2ND, 1941. BRITISH NIGHT BOMBER Visit to a Factory Making Armstrong- Whitworth Whitleys Illustrated by "Flight " photographs IT has been said that waris diplomacy carried onby other means—ambas- sadors become soldiers and words become bombs. And the airliner of peace, formerly used for the transmission of the words, sometimes be- comes the bomber of wartime. Nearly always, however, the bomber is a machine specially designed and built for its grim purpose, since converted airliners do not usually make ll>% effective bombers. The cfcrman Condor from the Focke-Wulf factory is an example of a civil design adapted to warfare as a long-range bomber for use against British shipping off the Irish Coast. But one of the British bomber types which has done much of the bombing of Germany, the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley, is a pure military type and owes none of its ancestry to airliners. One glance at it on the factory aerodrome with the chill December wind blowing off the northern hills left no doubt about this. No aeroplane could look more uncom- promising. With its matt black underneath and its camou- flage on sides and top, it's only touch of gaiety was the red, white and blue circles surrounded by the yellow one. With its fuselage deep right back to the rear turret, it looked big, but when it took off in the hands of Fit. Lt. Eric Greenwood it gave a performance which removed the illusion of size and replaced it with an impression or activity. With wheel brakes on and the two Rolls-Royce Merlins opened up, the tail was off the ground almost before the The dihedral of the Whitley commences at the wing joint outboard of the engines. Inboardof this the wing has a horizontal top surface. The projection on the nose is the bomb-aimer's panel of flat glass. take-off run had started. Flying light, the machine was air-borne in about n seconds with a run which appeared to be less than ibo yards. And then it was put into a steep climb, with a turn at the top which could almost: be described as a stall turn. A circuit was made at about 1,000 feet, followed by a power dive to roar across the aerodrome in its characteristic tail-up attitude at a height of about 100 feet. This was not dive-bombing, for which the Whitley was not designed nor intended, but it looked rather like it. A walk around the factory showed a very large number of operatives employed on the production of this bomber, some making small pieces, such as small metal brackets, perhaps no larger than one inch square, while at the other end of the scale stood the man whose job it was to trans port the whole wing by overhead crane from the shop where it was assembled to the painting shop behind it.; "drop curtain." This wing is a very large affair, as it is assembled in one piece from wing tip to wing tip com- plete with engine mountings and undercarriage attach- ments, and its span is 84 feet. Unlike tin; method of assembly of many other air- craft in which the wing is made in three main sections (the centre plane and two main plane;:.), and these three attached to the fuselage, it i.^ the iusclage of the Whitley which is made in two part; and attached to the mad1' in one-piece wing. The from fus-eluge is held on to the front web of the wing spar bv four pin joints, and a similar attachment is used for the rear fuselage. Like many other designs which are fulfilling their pur- pose effectively in this war. Fuselages are built on stee'ijigs by mounting the trans- verse frames on the jig andthen attaching the longi- tudinal stringers ; skinriveting follows
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