Cost of British military aircraft and engines?

[alejandro_]

The Mosquito dropped from £6,000 in 1941

I double ckecked the data I saved and the person who wrote it was first talking about woking hours. Maybe he got confused.

Tomo, have you not come across the prices paid by Yugoslavia when importing aircraft prior to the war? It would be interesting as the YuAF had an interesting mix.

 

[tomo pauk]

...
Tomo, have you not come across the prices paid by Yugoslavia when importing aircraft prior to the war? It would be interesting as the YuAF had an interesting mix.

Unfortunately, I didn't make any serious research on the Royal Yu air force.
Good idea, though.

 

[Jugman]

There's a list of the average cost of British bombers in: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/664/2/adt-NU20050104.11440202whole.pdf

I'm sorry this is off topic but, chapter three is a masterpiece of delusional thinking. There is no more polite way to say it than that. Much of it is a mushy pile of ambiguity, bad anecdotal evidence, and assumptions. I get the distinct impression the author had a conclusion and simply stopped the moment he found anything that could be made to fit his conclusion. His claim that British engines were dominating the US commercial market is very easily proven false. Nor is Fedden's perception that P&W was reverse engineering the Jupiter V evidence of reverse engineering. Considering Bristol and P&W had differing design philosophies I very much doubt there would have been all that much that P&W would have found useful. Fedden was a very competent engineer but the Jupiter wasn't some superlative groundbreaking design. In fact the Jupiter didn't have particularly good sales until the Jupiter VI of 1926. This was the first production model with a forged crankcase and one piece master rods. Before this the Armstrong-Siddeley Jaguar was the more dominant engine in British services.

On the aircraft side all you need to do is look at the first flight dates of various British commercial and general aviation types and compare them to foreign types in the same time period and it becomes very clear that British manufacturers were pretty conservative in their designs. It's even more apparent when you look at construction details. All metal stressed-skin construction had been around for a decade by the time the Monomail made its first flight. The Monomail* didn't advance the level of aviation technology, every feature existed before in other designs. What it did new was combined them into one design. As a whole, and even though they had many of the early pioneers in the advanced features that embody the Monomail, the British aircraft industry failed recognize the significance of these features. Fahey's 'good reasons' are actually points in favor of those he is criticizing.

* I should note that the Monomail was first but not the only one. Both the Lockheed Orion (all wood construction) and the Northrop Alpha (fixed landing gear) largely embodied the same ideas.

 

[fubar57]

Anything in here that would interest you Tomo?

 

[tomo pauk]

Anything in here that would interest you Tomo?

Thank you, Geo I already have the book, but never looked at prices listed there. Doh.

 

[at ease]

From pp82/83 of chapter 9 of:

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A.J. Baime

(Quote)
[.....]
Four days later, just before midnight, an armored car pulled up to Gate 4 of
the Rouge. Two soldiers unloaded top-secret blueprints for the Rolls-Royce
Merlin aircraft engine, the British-designed power plant that was the jewel of the
Royal Air Force. Following the blueprints, the Fords received the aircraft engine
itself. Knudsen arrived in Dearborn from Washington to help study the project.
On June 13(1940), Edsel returned to Washington with Sorensen to finalize the deal.
They arrived at 8:30 AM and headed to the Mayflower Hotel for breakfast.
Knudsen met them there. All talk was of aviation engines—the scintillating
technical challenge of producing them en masse, according to automobile
manufacturing principles.
Edsel appeared tired that morning. Not long before, he had checked himself
into Henry Ford Hospital with crippling stomach pain; doctors had run
uncomfortable tests, making him imbibe barium solutions and forcing tubes
down his throat. They were unable to diagnose anything. "I was concerned about
Edsel," Sorensen later remembered. "The doctors were keeping tabs on him. . . .
When he showed signs of indigestion, from which he suffered a great deal, his
father would be impatient about that. He would criticize Edsel unmercifully."
In Washington, Edsel and Sorensen negotiated a contract for 9,000 RollsRoyce Merlin aircraft engines. Six thousand would go to the British, and the
other 3,000 to the US military. The government would pay Ford a provisional
price of $16,000 per engine (about $10 per horsepower). Edsel kept his father
abreast of negotiations by phone, carefully explaining the situation so as not to
upset him. To Edsel's amazement, he was able to convince his father that the
family should take on the project. As Sorensen later wrote in his diary: "I am
surprised . . . Henry Ford had stated that he would not make any war supplies for
any foreign nation. . . . No one could have been more careful in keeping him
fully informed than Edsel and I had been."
[.....]
(Unquote)

Shortly after Henry Ford changed his mind and backed out of the project.

The Merlin went on to be produced by Packard.

I have no cost figures for the Packard Merlin, but I imagine that it would be for an amount similar to what was offered Ford, for an equivalent production run.