Avro Lincoln - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What was the advantage of this aircraft? As far as I can tell it was just a slightly better performing Lancaster and really was just the same aircraft with better engines; why put it into service and not go for a better aircraft overall like how the US jumped to the B29 and B36?
Lincoln is essentially a modified Lancaster with wings strengthened and enlarged to handle extra weight and the additional power from improving Merlin engines. In fact the Merlin used is the two stage inter-cooled variant. Hence Lincoln would have had a much higher service ceiling, almost equal to the American turbo-charged aircraft.
The reason one would choose this aircraft for production is simply that it could use parts, tooling etc from the massive Lancaster production system.
It might take two years to go from a prototype to Production. Consider it took around 90 days to build and fly the P-51 but nearly two years to get it coming out of production lines. Consider that it was easy to build and test fly the Merlin mustang but it took nearly two years to get it out of the door as well. To build an aircraft like this needs thousands of drawings, when drawings are revised they need to be marked, approved, put into drawing registers and most importantly impacted parties informed of the change lest the thousands of necessary modifications impact negatively the change. Parts list (Bills of Materials) need to be created and someone needs to know how to order the right amount at the right time, having organized subcontractors to make the part and have a logistics system that doesn't loose them after delivery. Work Instructions need to be created and tested, in particular how to quality test something. Engineers are up to their neck in documents. In addition tooling needs to be developed and built. Most of all everyone should be familiar with what they are doing rather than relearning.
If this isn't done your production line clogs up and only slowly trickles out aircraft that invariably need to be reworked. Instead of building a 4 engined bomber in 12000 hours it takes 100,000. Instead of building a single engined fighter in 2000 hours it takes 12000 (which is what the DB603 Italian fighters initially took)
By 1944 it must have been obvious that to British planners that the UK was essentially bankrupt and being kept functioning at the level it was by lend lease. Britain had already entirely ceded the production of transport aircraft to the USA. British engineers and manufacturers could no doubt have produced some absolutely outstanding aircraft, you can see them in British secret projects volume 3, but ask yourself at what cost? What would need to be sacrificed? Building something equal to say a B-29 but powered by Centaurus or Griffon engines might have delayed the roll out of a new bomber or impacted Lancaster production as lines were changed over and perhaps couldn't have been ready in time. Lincoln on the other hand could be built and be ready for equipping "Tiger Force" for its task of attacking Japan from Okinawa. Given Japans complete lack of fuel and materials to defend itself the Lincoln would not meet much resistance. Perhaps the best use of British resources would have been to build Centaurus powered B-29 while developing jet aircraft.
The only reason I could think of was that many seem to have regarded Bomber command as an out of control monster by the end of d-day 1944, eating up resources, saturation bombing cities to little advantage.