Unlike almost every other WWII airplane, the Lanc was good to go when it first went into production. The engineers scrounged up the necessary metal for a prototype, and the resultant Manchester III was quickly renamed Lancaster, in order to cast off any suggestion of its unfortunate parentage. Actually, he told Avro to “go dig for it.” As far as the RAF was concerned, it already had the four-engine Handley Page Halifax and didn’t need to complicate the picture.Īs it turned out, Avro had some very good friends at Rolls-Royce and found itself in possession of four Merlins. Avro asked for the necessary engines and scarce aluminum alloy to create a prototype, and was told by one particular Colonel Blimp to go pound sand. The Air Ministry, however, wouldn’t hear of it. The Manchester’s designer, the legendary Roy Chadwick, saw this coming and had already made plans for a four-Merlin-engine Manchester. So Avro was left with an excellent but underpowered twin-engine airframe. But it turned out that localizing all 24 connecting rods around a single central crank created cooling and oil-feed problems, and the Vulture probably never ran semi-reliably at more than 1,450 to 1,550 hp and too often spun its bearings.
Rolls hoped the Vulture would generate 1,760 hp, with further upgrades inevitable. The cylinder banks were from Rolls’ Peregrine V-12, a small, 880-hp predecessor of the Merlin. The Vulture was an X-24: four banks of six cylinders each, arranged in a star pattern around a common crankcase and crankshaft.
Lancaster bomber crew audio plus#
The Manchester project involved that bane of aircraft builders, a new airframe plus an unproven engine, the Rolls-Royce Vulture. Hard to imagine, but the Lancaster was directly descended from the twin-engine Avro Manchester, the least successful of the RAF’s covey of “heavyish” bombers. The special Lancasters that carried them not only had bellied-out bomb-bay doors but special landing gear for overweight landings. Grand Slams were so expensive-only 41 were ever dropped on German targets-that Lanc crews were forbidden to jettison them. The Lancaster’s bomb bay was so huge that it was the only WWII airplane that could heft the RAF’s 22,000-pound Grand Slam bomb and take it up to 18,000 feet, an altitude that allowed it to attain a near-supersonic, concrete-penetrating terminal velocity. Not as stylish or high-performance as the Boeing B-17, the lumbering Lanc forewent coolness points in favor of typically carrying two or three times a Flying Fortress’ bombload to Germany. Yet sired by this force of low-and-slow bomb trucks came the single most useful heavy bomber of World War II over Europe: the Avro Lancaster. Handley Page Heyfords and Hampdens, Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys, Fairey Hendons, Vickers Wellingtons, Short Stirlings-a long string of mulish two- and four-engine bombers with all the grace of railroad boxcars and not much better performance had been the Royal Air Force’s stock in trade for far too long. It crash-landed on her lawn in 1944, but the RAF, despite numerous reminders, simply keeps forgetting to come round and pick it up.” “The last survivor serves today as a chicken house-albeit an impressive one-for the Maharani of Gunjipor. “Four Varley Panjandrum engines screwed her up to a cruising altitude several feet over the legal minimum of the day,” read the accompanying text. The British representative was the Humbley-Pudge Gallipoli Heavyish Bomber. The Japanese Kakaka Shirley was an amphibious pedal-bomber, and the American candidate was a primary trainer with all 19 student pilots under one 50-yard-long greenhouse, for the sake of economy. The Italian fighter was double-ended so it could switch sides instantly. It was a catalogue of aircraft encapsulating several nations’ worst aeronautical excesses, in a manner that today might be considered politically incorrect. The brilliant comedic artist Bruce McCall illustrated a 1971 article in playboy magazine titled “Major Howdy Bixby’s Album of Forgotten Warbirds.” The Avro Lancaster rained terror on Germany but never attained the B-17’s fame, even though it could carry twice the bombload over an equal distance. Avro Lancaster: The Night Raider | HistoryNet Close
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