Design and Development
The AW.15 Atalanta was designed to meet a 1930 Imperial Airways requirement for an airliner for its African lines, in particular for the service between Kisumu in Kenya and Cape Town, South Africa. The specification called for an airliner that could carry nine passengers, three crew and a load of freight for 400 mi (640 km), cruising at 115 mph (185 km/h) at 9,000 ft (2,740 m). As Imperial Airways had decided to standardise on four-engined aircraft to prevent the failure of a single engine causing forced landings, the specification required four engines. The prototype, G-ABPI, was named Atalanta and first flew on 6 June 1932, flown by Alan Campbell-Orde.
The Atalanta was a high-wing monoplane with four 340 hp (250 kW) Armstrong Siddeley Serval III ten-cylinder radial engines. Its composite construction included steel, plywood and fabric; the undercarriage was fixed but was streamlined to minimize drag. The overall design of the aircraft was rather modern, and somewhat closed the performance gap between British and American airliners.
The aircraft had few design flaws and any teething problems were quickly overcome. The prototype was flown to Croydon Airport for acceptance by Imperial Airways, and on 26 September 1932, it flew a commercial service from Croydon to Brussels and Cologne.
The Atalanta could carry up to 17 passengers but Imperial Airlines limited the seating to nine for the planes on the Indian route and 11 on the African route.
On 20 October 1932, the prototype was damaged in a test flight due to fuel starvation. Imperial Airways was embarrassed by the accident and renamed the third production machine (G-ABTI, Arethusa) as Atalanta, hoping nobody would notice the swap.
Read more about this topic: Armstrong Whitworth Atalanta
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