Archibald Russell - Bristol Aeroplane Company

Bristol Aeroplane Company

Another of George White’s companies was the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Russell joined the company in May 1925, at age 21, as an assistant in the stress office. He met Miss Lorna Mansfield, a secretary at the company, and they were married for over 50 years. One of his first efforts at the company were stress calculations for the Type 99 Badminton, a biplane racer being built for the 1926 King’s Cup. The Badminton crashed a month before the race, which gravely concerned Russell until the reason was revealed to be a seized engine. Another early design was the Type 95 Bagshot, a twin-engine monoplane fighter. Russell was invited to take a flight in the Bagshot, and was alarmed to see the wings twisting during control use, a problem that led to the abandoning of the design. He developed a new method of separately calculating bending and torsional stresses, which later led to a new single-spar monoplane wing design that was granted a patent.

Over a short period of time, Chief Designer Frank Barnwell drew Russell closer into the primary design team. He worked on the Type 105 Bulldog, which went on to see production of more than 500 examples. This was followed by another monoplane fighter, the Type 133, but the contract was won by the Gloster Gladiator instead.

In 1935 the first of the RAF Expansion Schemes was launched, and Bristol won two contracts for monoplanes, the Bombay troop-carrier and the Blenheim bomber. Barnwell and his two chief assistants, Leslie Frise and Russell, looked to address the Bagshot's wing problems in the Bombay, and over-designed it to ensure flexing would not be an issue. The design suffered as a result, both overweight and extremely difficult to manufacture. Only 50 were built and saw limited service.

The Blenheim was based on newer designs and was originally built for speed, not utility. It was the result of contest to produce the fastest four-passenger plane in Europe, and therefore did not require the higher weights and ruggedness of the Bombay. It had a much simpler design, but proved just as capable, and was easily adapted into a light bomber. The Blenheim was far more successful then Bombay, with over 1,000 delivered by the start of the Second World War in September 1939.

In August 1938 Barnwell had been killed flying a small aeroplane of his own design. Leslie Frise took over the Chief Designer role, with Russell becoming deputy. They were immediately put to work on a variety of development of the Blenheim, including the Type 152 Beaufort and Type 156 Beaufighter. More than 5,500 Beaufighter's were built before the war ended. A final development, the Type 164 "Brigand", was produced only in small numbers before being replaced by the English Electric Canberra.

In 1941 the Air Staff placed a development contract for a long-range, 100 ton, 300 mph heavy bomber with a bomb load of 80,000 lbs. The aircraft was designed to fill Barnes Wallis' concept of the "Victory Bomber", which would drop huge "earth quake bombs" that would destroy dams and other power plants even with a near miss, and thereby render Germany unable to run its industry. Frise and Russell started work on such a design, featuring extensive streamlining for lower drag and better range, powered by eight Centaurus engines, paired to drive four propellers. But before the design had got very far, Wallis had moved onto the idea of a smaller special-purpose bomb that could fill the same role, but would be much smaller. This developed into the famed bouncing bomb carried by the Avro Lancaster.