Fairey Battle and her modifications

If anyone have book " Battle File " of Sidney Shail can see where is mentioned proposed twin engine battle.
 
airman said:
If anyone have book " Battle File " of Sidney Shail can see where is mentioned proposed twin engine battle.
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Indeed, as do others. However none provide a primary source and more than likely all rely on Huntley's comments. Greg Baughen, in 'The Fairey Battle: a reassessment of its RAF career", notes that there is no mention of such a project in the official Fairey drawing register, which certainly raises more than a few questions.
 
Schneiderman said:
Indeed, as do others. However none provide a primary source and more than likely all rely on Huntley's comments. Greg Baughen, in 'The Fairey Battle: a reassessment of its RAF career", notes that there is no mention of such a project in the official Fairey drawing register, which certainly raises more than a few questions.
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So consideer that Ian Huntley is an archivist that probably had accessed to Farey and he worked for Farey. So additional sources can be useful.
 
airman said:
So consideer that Ian Huntley is an archivist that probably had accessed to Farey and he worked for Farey. So additional sources can be useful.
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Indeed, yet several of his articles are erroneous to the extent of being fantasy, and his desire to portray Richard Fairey as a far-sighted innovator prevented from fulfilling his visions by blinkered officials hardly stands up to scrutiny.
 
Schneiderman said:
Indeed, yet several of his articles are erroneous to the extent of being fantasy, and his desire to portray Richard Fairey as a far-sighted innovator prevented from fulfilling his visions by blinkered officials hardly stands up to scrutiny.
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If speculations are based on real proposed versions i like it .
 
Do we know anyhing about the first image posted in Post#1 ?
It -looks -'Official' . . .

cheers,
Robin.
 
robunos said:
Do we know anyhing about the first image posted in Post#1 ?
It -looks -'Official' . . .

cheers,
Robin.
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Really? Looks like something sketched on the back of a fag packet to me. Very different from their standard GA drawings
 
Schneiderman said:
Really? Looks like something sketched on the back of a fag packet to me. Very different from their standard GA drawings
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There's a long history of official designs initially sketched on the back of a fag packet! From personal experience, problem reports on the in-house change management system at GMAv Rochester were called Basic Overview of Functional Problem, but that wasn't what the acronym initially stood for ;)

More seriously, if and when Fairey talked about a twin-engined Battle, could he really have meant a Battle with the two halves of a Monarch?
 
Schneiderman said:
Really? Looks like something sketched on the back of a fag packet to me. Very different from their standard GA drawings
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That's why I was asking, I can see it's not a works drawing. I was thinking along the lines of a sketch to show the 'Man from the Ministry', or sent to the aeronautical press, to try to drum up some interest,along the lines of 'we're looking at a twin engined Battle. If we built it, this is what it would look like.'

cheers,
Robin.
 
robunos said:
That's why I was asking, I can see it's not a works drawing. I was thinking along the lines of a sketch to show the 'Man from the Ministry', or sent to the aeronautical press, to try to drum up some interest,along the lines of 'we're looking at a twin engined Battle. If we built it, this is what it would look like.'

cheers,
Robin.
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Many concepts would indeed have started life this way, but if their intention was to convince the Air Staff that their Specification needed to undergo a radical change I suggest that something far more professional would have been required. Preferably without the minor but rather odd error (I'll let you spot that)
 
After a game of "spot the difference" I found the minor error, but I've seen worse errors on GA drawings before.

The two sketches look a little rougher around the edges, they do look much more conceptual in nature. The GA drawing looks genuine to me, the dimensions seem to be properly scaled etc. If it is a fake, then a draughtsman/someone who knew what they were doing must have drawn it (it predates the digital era at any rate).
I feel anyone could have doodled the two sketches though.
 
Schneiderman said:
OK, unless anyone can produce 'reliable' evidence to the contrary I do not believe that there ever was a Fairey project for a twin-engine Battle. The only source for the idea appears to be Ian Huntley, whose writings are hardly the most factual.
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That's not quite right. When Fairey was faced with the cancellation of Battle orders at its Stockport plant at the end of 1937, it put forward several options to turn the plant over to a Fairey design (rather than build another firm's aircraft). Four options were put to the Air Min in late 1937, but Air Member Research and Development Wilfrid Freeman was only vaguely interested in Option C - a twin Merlin Battle, calculated with a max speed of 297mph. Nothing came of it, Stockport going over to build the Fulmar (among other things). See National Archives AIR 6/32 Progress Meeting 11th January 1938
 
Apologies, but I have to chip in to challenge this characterisation of Mr Huntley, who is no longer around to reply on his own behalf. I met him and corresponded with him over several years while working on my Skua book a couple of decades ago and he was rigorous on detail and absolutely scrupulous about accuracy. Based on personal experience of him, I cannot accept the suggestion that he would make anything up, let alone the existence of a proposed aircraft type. Incidentally, he was also a skilled enough illustrator to have convincingly faked an official Fairey GA if he'd been of a mind. As I said, I find it impossible to believe something like that would have crossed his mind. As others have pointed out, he worked at Faireys for many years, and he saved a lot of material that would otherwise have been destroyed. His archive is now at the FAAM (it wouldn't surprise me if the Fairey GA list in the FAAM archive that Greg Baughen references came from Ian) so it's possible that something there might shed more light on the twin Battle. The lack of a reference to the 'Scheme 5' in the GA list only suggests to me that it had not gone beyond sketches, to the point where a formal numbered drawing would have been required. It looks to me like something from an informal brochure suggesting a variety of potential layouts.

A twin-engined Battle from around that time makes a certain amount of sense in that it could potentially have combined the bomb load and crew size of the P.27/32 with the performance of the straight Hart-replacement that Ludlow-Hewitt wanted. Indeed, the aircraft that later rendered P.4/34 redundant was the Blenheim, for that very reason.
 
XN923 said:
Apologies, but I have to chip in to challenge this characterisation of Mr Huntley, who is no longer around to reply on his own behalf. I......
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My judgement of Huntley's reliability comes from the article he wrote in Scale Aircraft Modelling in January 1990 titled 'The Other Spitfire'. This is so full of factual errors, wild assumptions and omissions that fantasy was the only word I could really use to describe it. As a consequence I can only treat his other works with extreme caution
 
Schneiderman said:
My judgement of Huntley's reliability comes from the article he wrote in Scale Aircraft Modelling in January 1990 titled 'The Other Spitfire'. This is so full of factual errors, wild assumptions and omissions that fantasy was the only word I could really use to describe it. As a consequence I can only treat his other works with extreme caution
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Is it "several of his articles" as you said above or just this one? I can't comment on the 'Other Spitfire' article as I haven't seen it but it seems a bit extreme to trash the man's entire career on the strength of one piece. I know from bitter experience how easy it is to be certain of something from the information available, which later turns out to be wrong. I can point to some significant enough inaccuracies from e.g. Francis K. Mason, Bill Gunston, Robert Gruenhagen, mostly because I'm lucky enough to have stumbled across information that wasn't available to them but I don't think it would be fair to use that to call into question everything they ever wrote. As I said, my experience of working with Ian was that he was an awful lot more meticulous than most.

Certainly as far as the 'Twin Battle' is concerned I haven't seen anything that should arouse suspicion, and what has been published about it strikes me as quite consistent with Fairey's approach. It's not unlike the 'expansion plans' for the Hendon, about which I found little in the official files but which make perfect sense in terms of how Fairey tended to work (which is to say looking towards the next opportunity rather than perfecting the one that's in hand). The trouble with proposals that are rejected cursorily after informal approaches is that information only tends to remain at the manufacturer, and there's little protection when later spring-cleaning takes place.

On judging the authenticity of drawings I think we need to distinguish between 'proper' GAs for official projects, done on linen at 1/24 scale, signed and dated, with drawings done for any number of other purposes that happen to be 'general arrangement'. E.g. this one of the Battle from my collection, drawn at Fairey Aviation in ink (over pencil) on board which is a 'general arrangement drawing' but completely different to Fairey's official style.

IMG_20170807_1884S.jpg Perhaps we could treat each case on its merits?
 
XN923 said:
Is it "several of his articles" as you said above or just this one? I can't comment on the 'Other Spitfire' article as I haven't seen it but it seems a bit extreme to trash the man's entire career on the strength of one piece.
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It is more than one article but I pointed to that one as an example because it is so demonstrably erroneous and misleading. I have annotated my copy to note 71 obvious errors and dubious comments, right from the first paragraph.
I have no issue with Fairey having sketched ideas for a twin-engine battle at some point but to say that they wished to submit it to an AM Specification that called for a single engine bomber design makes absolutely no sense, most especially as there was a parallel specification for a twin-engine bomber with comparable range and load requirements to which it could have been tendered.
 
Schneiderman said:
It is more than one article but I pointed to that one as an example because it is so demonstrably erroneous and misleading. I have annotated my copy to note 71 obvious errors and dubious comments, right from the first paragraph.
I have no issue with Fairey having sketched ideas for a twin-engine battle at some point but to say that they wished to submit it to an AM Specification that called for a single engine bomber design makes absolutely no sense, most especially as there was a parallel specification for a twin-engine bomber with comparable range and load requirements to which it could have been tendered.
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It makes more sense to have proposed it as an alternative to P.27/32 than to B.9/32 for all kinds of reasons. 1) Fairey was already submitting to P.27/32 and had done all the preparation for that specification. Proposals for a second specification would require a lot of extra work; 2) It was fairly common practice for manufacturers to suggest alternative layouts on a speculative basis if they thought it could better meet the performance requirements; 3) B.9/32 was hardly parallel - it wasn't a proper specification for a service type but a testing-of-the-water with the industry and it was probably pretty clear that the AM had little enthusiasm for it at that time. It was apparent that its requirements would be difficult or impossible to meet within the parameters set down - the manufacturers that did make submissions had to ask for concessions on weight, and the aircraft that did emerge from it were in a much higher size/weight class so a twin-Battle was clearly not what the AM had in mind; 4) P.27/32 was something of a halfway house, and the arrival of Ludlow-Hewitt during this period with his preference for a higher performance suggests the kind of changing thinking that might prompt a quick study on possible alternatives. The development of the Blenheim suggests that Fairey was thinking on the right lines but didn't quite get its timing right.
 
Absolutely, both issued to industry in order to assess what might be possible, either single or twin-engined, within the tare weight constraints that had been suggested by Britain at Geneva. As such there was indeed nothing to be gained at the time from trying to work around the requirements laid down in the Specification, although obviously with the collapse of the talks all constraints were removed.
Blenheim and Whitley were both seen as simple means to reduce development and delivery times by benefiting from design work already in hand, in both cases for transport types, while Specifications for future bomber types were under review.
 
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Sorry, as a "lurker" on this site I can't help but pitch in to defend the late Ian D. Huntley. I met him and had an extensive correspondence with him. I always found him a real gentleman, a stickler for detail and always ready to acknowledge if he got anything wrong (as anyone who wrote as extensively as he did inevitable will). He was always apologising as being the one responsible for the flaws in the old Airfix Fairey Battle (as Fairey archivist he had mistakenly sent Airfix the plans for an early prototype layout which differed from the final production aircraft). He was a bit partisan to his beloved Fairey company, hardly a sin, if partisanship was a sin the authors of most of the Putnam aircraft company titles would be damned! The crudeness of the "fag-packet" drawing of the Twin Battle is actually a point in its favour. Huntley was a good draftsman (for example see the drawings he did of the Fairey Hendon he did for Aircraft Illustrated in 1974), if he had fabricated the drawings of the Twin Battle he he would have done a far better job.
 

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