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Aviation History
1943
1943 - 2161.PDF
SEPTEMBER 1943 FLIGHT TUNISIAN "AERO SHOW and is partly metal- and partly fabric- covered. Another three-engined transport which was originally developed for civil use and was pressed into service by the Italians was the SM 75. With three Alfa-Romeo 126 RC34 9-cylinder radials, this has a much greater dis- posable load than the G 12, but is not so fast. It resembles the military SM82. in many superficial respects, but is, in fact, a rather different air- craft^-particularly in the design of the To ease the pressure on their air transport organisation, the Germans pressed into service Fw 200CS and Jugos as petrol- and freight-carriers. Even Ju88s and Me 110s with exter- nal jettisonable tanks brought petrol to the hard-pressed North African forces. Full use was also made of the load-carrying capacity of the BV222 six-engined flying boat; unfortu- nately, no examples of this aircraft were captured. The latest version engines and is quite heavily armed. The D.F.S.230 glider is more conventional in design than the Go 242, of which apicture appears on the previous page. has six BMW 801 Towed gliders were represented by the twin-boom 79ft.Go 242 and the smaller and more conventional D.F.S.230. The New Version o€ the LiberatorT HE Liberator, which has proved its versatility by its employment as a cargo and transport aircraft (in the latter version known as the C.87), has undergone innumerable design changes, and appears now in the Allied air offensives in its latest form. The different stages of development of the Liberator have been marked mainly by variations in the defensive armament of the aircraft. The Liberator I had gun turrets amidships, while on the Liberator II the defensive armament remained the same, the only modification being an internal one, dispensing with the flight engineer and giving the pilot a full panel of instruments and controls. On the Liberator III the mid- ship gun turret was moved forward and placed between the i*t-¥-. leading-edges of the wings and the cockpit roof. A further variation on the same theme was provided by different armament in Liberators in British and American employment. The R.A.F. Liberator III has a tail turret armed with four .303 Brownings ; two flexible machine guns on each side of the fuselage ; two in the top turret, and two or three in the nose. The American types carried two .5 American Brownings in the tail turret, and similarly one gun on each side of the fuselage; two .5 in top and two or three guns in the nose. This formidable defensive fire power of the Liberator has now been further increased by the modifications carried out in the Willow Run plant. The new. version of the Liberator, powered with Buick-built twin-row Wasps of 2,000 h.p., is equipped with an Emerson nose turret and a retractable underslung ball turret. The Emerson turret, resembling the equipment of British four-engined bombers, can be mounted either in the tail or the nose and is so con- structed as to give the gunner an unrestricted field • of vision of almost 300 deg. A screen of armour-piercing bullets at a rate of 2,000 per minute is fired from the Emerson. While the Liberator III has a bomb load of about 8,000 lb., fuel, range and altitude modifications on the new version are said to have increased it further. It is even claimed that the latest version of both the Fortress and the Liberator carry as much as ten tons of bombs ! In addition to the bomb-bay the new Liberator is reported to carry a two-ton block-buster slung underneath each wing. PER DERBY AMP ASTRA TN certain daily papers last week a cabled message •*• announced that '' a new type Rolls-Royce aero engine with a two-speed two-stage su-percharger, devised by British and Packard engineers, has been in volume production for some months. ..." This form of message diverts a great deal of credit which is rightly due to British engineers, as the engine in question is the Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 initiated by the world-famous Derby firm and is entirely British. It was described in detail and illustrated in Flight of December 17th, 1942. Actually the first engine with two-stage supercharger was running in this country as long ago as March, 1941, and.flying in July of that yea'r. It has been in operational use on British aircraft for some months, and constitutes one of the greatest engineering achievements of modern times. Now fitted to the P51 Mustang in U.S.A., it has raised the ceiling of that excellent aircraft by over two miles. Last week Flight, on page 220, drew attention to a somewhat similar misquotation—for misquotation it must have been, since we know Peter Masefield to be too know- ledgeable and well informed to describe the Packard-built Rolls-Royce engine as "the literal saviour of England." As we have, already observed, the first Packard engine built to Rolls-Royce drawings did not appear until many months after the Battle of Britain. Jhese are but two examples of exaggerated claims which serve no good purpose at a time when technical achieve- ment is more the painstaking goal of British engineers than boasting. Undoubtedly we need greatly improved methods of propaganda to convey to our American friends what this country is actually doing; it is a regrettable fact that the U.S. Press is in the main noticeably silent about British technical attainments in the aeronautical sphere.
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