Blackburn Firebrand
The Blackburn Firebrand was a British single-seat naval strike fighter built by Blackburn Aircraft Limited for the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. Designed as a carrier fighter around the Napier Sabre engine, it lost the Sabre to the Hawker Typhoon and was re-engined with the Bristol Centaurus and re-roled as a torpedo fighter. Its development took so long that it entered service only in September 1945; it equipped two front-line squadrons before the Westland Wyvern replaced it in 1953, and no example survives.
Why It Mattered
The Firebrand was designed to give the Fleet Air Arm what Specification N.11/40 asked for: a well armed modern single seat monoplane for carrier operations. Work had begun in March 1939 on a two-seat fleet interceptor, but development dragged on so long that, when it finally reached squadrons in September 1945, the design had been recast as a single-seat strike aircraft carrying a torpedo. John Rickard's history of the type presents it as demonstrating the difficulties encountered by many aircraft manufacturers when developing new aircraft during the Second World War. It reached its first front-line squadron only in September 1945, and it never saw action in the Second World War.
Design Notes
The Firebrand was a low-winged, all-metal monoplane, and a large one: the size inherited from its two-seat origins left it wider, longer and heavier than even the Chance-Vought F4U Corsair. Its outer wing panels folded manually for hangar stowage, and large Fairey-Youngman flaps were fitted to give the lift that carrier landings needed. The Sabre-powered marks were built around the Napier Sabre III, a 2,305hp liquid-cooled twenty-four cylinder H-type engine. The switch to the Bristol Centaurus radial changed the aircraft's shape: the Mk III took a 2,400hp Centaurus VII, and the early Spitfire-style canopy was replaced with a tear-drop canopy. The production Mk IV used the 2,520-horsepower Centaurus IX and gained a larger horn balanced rudder, which improved its handling at slow speeds, plus dive brakes that let it act as a dive bomber. For armament it carried four 20 millimeter Hispano autocannons, plus 16 RP-3 rockets and a heavy store that was either a single torpedo weighing 1,850 pounds or a pair of bombs weighing 2,000 pounds each. One unusual fitting was an airspeed gauge mounted outside the cockpit, so that on the approach the pilot need not look down into the cockpit to read his speed, an arrangement since seen as foreshadowing the modern heads-up display.
Operational History
The Royal Navy ordered three B-37 prototypes in January 1941; the earliest F.Mk I example took to the air for the first time on 27 February 1942. Flight testing exposed its limits: it came in 32 mph below its estimated top speed, though moving from the Napier Sabre II to the Sabre III did lift both speed and overall performance. In the summer of 1943 the Ministry of Aircraft Production decided to allocate all Sabre engines to the Hawker Typhoon, and the Firebrand's career as a fighter was over; nine F.Mk Is were produced. The ministry instead gave the design a new purpose, as a fast carrier-borne torpedo bomber: the T.F. Mk II prototype made its maiden flight on 31 March 1943, and its first flight with a torpedo, on 2 April, made it the first single-seat torpedo bomber in the world. Production of the Sabre-powered T.F. Mk II stopped at just twelve aircraft, and the Centaurus-powered T.F. Mk III followed in the same small way: twenty-seven were completed, and most were used for testing. The main production version was the T.F. Mk 4, whose first aircraft made its maiden flight on 17 May 1945; 102 T.F. Mk 4s were built, and the last of the 220 Firebrands produced were the similar T.F. Mk 5s. On 1 September 1945 No. 813 Squadron took the type into front-line service — one of just two such squadrons ever to fly it, the other being No. 827 Squadron. The Firebrand remained in service for eight years, operating from HMS Illustrious, HMS Implacable and HMS Eagle. Test pilot Eric Brown rated it short of performance and sadly lacking in manoeuvrability, and called it a disaster as a deck-landing aircraft.
Afterlife
Withdrawal came in 1953, when the turboprop Westland Wyvern took the Firebrand's place in service. No. 813 Squadron was re-equipped with turboprop Wyverns in February 1953, while No. 827 Squadron, which had received its TF 5s and 5As in December 1950 and flown them primarily from HMS Eagle, had disbanded the previous November. The type left no survivors: no examples of the aircraft are known to survive today. Blackburn's own attempt at an improved Firebrand, the B-48 Firecrest, was built to a specification calling for a redesigned wing and improved pilot's view, but it only reached the prototype stage, and its first prototype did not fly until 1 April 1947, when there was very little chance of it entering production. The B-48 itself never entered production, but it did provide the starting point for the later Blackburn B-54, a strike design with two seats and planned turboprop power.