Fairey Battle - Design and Development

Design and Development

The original Fairey Battle was designed to Specification P.27/32 as a two-seat day bomber, to replace the ageing Hawker Hart and Hind biplane bombers, and to act as an insurance policy in case heavier bombers were banned by the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference.

The Battle emerged as a single-engine, all-metal, low-wing cantilever monoplane, equipped with a retractable tail wheel landing gear. Its clean design with its long and slim fuselage and cockpit for three (pilot, navigator and gunner) seated in tandem with a continuous glazed canopy, was similar to a large fighter rather than a bomber. The armament and crew were similar to the Blenheim: three crew, 1,000 lbs bombload and two machine guns, although the Battle was a single-engine bomber, with less horsepower available. The Battle's standard payload of four 250 lb (110 kg) bombs was carried in cells inside the wings and an additional 500 lb (230 kg) of bombs could be carried on underwing racks. As the engine took up the nose area, the bomb aimer's position was under the wing center section, sighted through a sliding panel in the floor of the fuselage using the Mk. VII Course Setting Bomb Sight.

The prototype Battle first flew on 10 March 1936. When the RAF embarked on the pre-war expansion programme, the Battle became a priority production target, with 2,419 ordered and an initial production order placed for 155 Battles built to Specification P.23/35. The first of these aircraft was completed at Hayes, Middlesex in June 1937 but all subsequent aircraft were built at Fairey's new factory at Heaton Chapel, Stockport and tested at their Manchester (Ringway) facility. Subsequently the Austin Motors "Shadow Factory" at Longbridge manufactured 1,029 aircraft to Specification P.32/36. Total production was of 2,185 machines, as production lines were closed in advance, in September 1940. Production Battles were powered by the Rolls Royce Merlin I, II, III and V, and took their Mark numbers from the powerplant (for example, a Battle Mk II was powered by a Merlin II).

Replacing the RAF's Hawker Harts and Hinds when it entered service in 1937, the Battle was obsolescent even then as fighter technology had outstripped the modest performance gains that the light bomber possessed over its biplane antecedents. The Battle was armed only with a single Browning .303 machine gun fixed ahead and with a trainable Vickers K in the back; this was desperately inadequate. Moreover it lacked an armoured cockpit and self-sealing fuel tank.