Bomber B - Background

Background

The main problem for aircraft designers in the 1930s was a lack of engine power. Construction methods had progressed to the point where airframes could be built to any required size - especially in Germany with aircraft like the Dornier Do X flying boat and the Junkers G 38 airliner, and the Soviet Union with the enormous Maksim Gorki, the largest aircraft built anywhere in the 1930s - but the engines needed to lift such huge airframes with a relative minimum quantity of powerplants were not available. The U.S., confident in its ability to produce aviation engines, opted for four-engine designs with heavy defensive firepower, as seen in the B-17 Flying Fortress. The United Kingdom and Germany did not have this luxury. Both were severely constrained in engine production and tried to make do with two-engine designs. Both also invested heavily in a new generation of much more powerful engines, powerplants much like the American hyper engine concept of the 1930s, which would provide the needed power for B-17-sized aircraft powered by only two engines, an approach the United States never needed to use.

By the late 1930s, the new high-power engines started to appear, and both the British and Germans drew up designs based on them. The Avro Manchester proved to be a poor performer in practice, but when it and the Handley Page HP.66 were reworked with four smaller Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, resulting in the Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax, they had two truly useful heavy bombers. This same transformation from two very powerful engines to four more producible powerplants was also attempted by Nazi Germany with the Heinkel He 177, but in a much later timeframe by the late summer of 1943, with the quartet of DB 603-powered He 177B four engined prototypes successfully starting their flight tests by the end of 1943.