Adaptation of Existing Aircraft
The advantage of adapting existing aircraft was that the emergency fighter could be produced quickly. A variety of aircraft types were used: the Bristol Blenheim light bomber lacked performance in its intended role as a heavy day fighter, but found a useful niche as a strike fighter in Coastal Command and as a night fighter, pioneering the use of airborne intercept radar; the Russian Ilyushin Il-2 was occasionally used to escort other Shturmoviks on ground attack missions; and 26 British Miles Masters were produced, but never used, as the M.24 Master fighter with a single seat and six wing guns.
Modern attack aircraft are usually equipped to carry short range air-to-air missiles for self defense, some airforces because of inventory shortages will task their attack aircraft with a secondary air to air role, for example as with the Portuguese A-7 attack squadrons. During the late 1980s and early 1990s the United Kingdom planned to use their BAe Hawk trainer aircraft as point-defence fighters.
Read more about this topic: Emergency Fighter
Famous quotes containing the words adaptation and/or existing:
“The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)