Westland Whirlwind revisited

[stona]

5) GENERAL. It is my opinion that the design of the Whirlwind is greatly in advance of any contemporary aircraft including the Typhoon and Spitfire III. The wing and its flaps and slots are excellent. The machine's performance with more suitable engines would probably be revolutionary. I am confident that it could be landed by myself and the pilots of No. 263 Squadron at 45 a wing loading a Square foot. The rated altitude of the machine under these circumstances would have to be very much greater in order that the requisite speed be attained at high altitude to maintain manoeuvrability. It is agreed that the production problem involving two engines per aircraft is a serious disadvantage.

John Gray Munro​

Squadron Leader​

Munro would write that; he had made a significant personal and career investment in the type, similar to Beamont and the Typhoon. For example, Munro had designed the original armament specification for the aircraft.

For most of 1940 period the squadron was being kept well out of harm's way up in Scotland. The move south was instigated by serviceability levels, on the 4th August the ORB stated that, 'Of fifteen aircraft built, the squadron had eight, but four were grounded with engine problems and two were unserviceable, leaving two for training.'

Five months after the first delivery, and twenty-six months since her maiden flight, the Whirlwind was declared operational. It was almost an act of frustration by Sholto-Douglas, who wrote to Westlands

'It is now five months since 263 Squadron was re-formed, allegedly on Whirlwinds. I am taking its Hurricanes away and making it operational on Whirlwinds at RAF Exeter. It is up to you to make the squadron's initial strength up to sixteen at once.'

On the 28th the squadron managed to get ten aircraft serviceable for the ferry flights south. Munro himself flew most of the way on one engine, the other having seized.

By February 1941 the Whirlwind had killed five pilots in accidents, which is remarkable given the extremely limited amount of flying being done on the type. There would be more. Of all pilot losses on the two Whirlwind squadrons, 9 were killed in action, 20 were missing in action, and 17 were killed in flying accidents, many due to failures of the aircraft.

I would take Munro's assessment with a good pinch of salt. It is not born out by the operational history of the Whirlwind, which had barely begun when he wrote it.

 

[wuzak]

Gnome Rhone 14M could have been the basis for a better engine, just as the 12Y proved to be.

Better than what was available in Britain?

 

[wuzak]

So, if the Whirlwind is a dead end what else should its remarkable designer W. E. W. Petter be working on?

He was working on the Welkin.

 

[wuzak]

If you can magically come up with a new factory to make V12 engines, I'd have Merlins
On the other hand, having Napier making HS 12Ys instead of the Dagger will be a net gain to the UK war effort. Or the Armstrong-Siddeley to make it instead of the Tiger.

Not sure they made too many Daggers were built during or after 1940.

The Hawker Hart and the Fairey Battle were used as test beds for the Dagger and the Martin-Baker MB.2 was a single prototype fighter.

The main production use for the Dagger was for the Hawker Hector, a biplane of which less than 200 were built. They started being replaced in service by the Lysander in 1938.

And the other production aircraft to use it was the Handley-Page Hereford, Which had enough problems that most of the order was changed to Hampdens (same aircraft, different engines) and many of the ones that were completed were converted to Hampdens.

Dagger production facilities may have been used for the Sabre.


Also not sure how many Tigers were built.

160 of the 1,800 Whitleys had Tigers, 14 AW Ensigns, 7 Short Calcuttas and a few various prototypes.

Some of the 92 Blackburn Ripons may have used the Tiger too. These weren't in British use by 1940.

The other major user was the Blackburn Shark, 269 were built. These were replaced in FAA service with the Swordfish by 1937.

Armstrong-Siddeley were working on the Deerhound from 1935, building only prototypes. Since this was potentially a 2,000hp engine, if its issues could be solved, it would have been more useful than the HS12Y (or the Gnome-Rhône 14M).

Armstrong-Siddeley stopped development on teh Deerhound to concentrate on gas turbines (the ASX turbojet).

 

[tomo pauk]

<snip>

My point in A-S or Napier making HS 12Y under licence is that they will be producing an actually useful engine in late 1930s.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Care to elaborate?

W. E. W. Petter - Wikipedia

"Petter made a significant contribution to improving the longitudinal stability of the Spitfire"....

 

[tomo pauk]

W. E. W. Petter - Wikipedia

"Petter made a significant contribution to improving the longitudinal stability of the Spitfire"....

Thank you.

 

[stona]

The elevator was designed to 'cure tendency to tighten up during dive recoveries and tight turns'.

The new elevator was adopted by Mod.743. of 20th October 1942. The Mark VB Trop. did not get it for some reason. When it began to be fitted on the production lines would have been some time later.

Boscombe Down tested the elevator with convex surfaces designed by Westlands on AB186. It was considered satisfactory for the two conditions which it was designed to ameliorate, but the test pilots complained of a lack of feel when flaps were lowered.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Thank you.

i think Petter's skills would have been best applied to designing a single seat, single engine fighter for the FAA. Leave the RAF's fighters to Mitchell/Smith and Sir Camm. Of course come back for the Lightning, Britain's only wholly home-built Mach 2 fighter, something Camm never accomplished.

Imagine a single engine fighter for the WW2 era FAA with the Whirlwind's streamlining and heavy armament.

 

[fastmongrel]

Britain's only wholly home-built Mach 2 fighter, something Camm never accomplished.

The bloody Govt kept cancelling his supersonic designs. he had several good designs cancelled just before the prototypes were started or before they were finished.
Hawker P1103
Hawker P1121

 

[stona]

Imagine a single engine fighter for the WW2 era FAA with the Whirlwind's streamlining and heavy armament.

It would have been to an Admiralty specification, which means it would probably have ended up looking like a dog's dinner...and had at least two crew.

 

[Greyman]

I would take Munro's assessment with a good pinch of salt. It is not born out by the operational history of the Whirlwind, which had barely begun when he wrote it.

Sholto did describe Munro's report as 'too rosy a picture'.

 

[stona]

Sholto did describe Munro's report as 'too rosy a picture'.

I'm not surprised !

 

[Schweik]

I've still yet to see any convincing evidence that the Whirlwind wouldn't have been a very useful replacement for the Typhoon for the first couple of years of that aircraft's career or that production resources were better spent building Defiants, Lysanders and Henleys. Or hell license the design to a firm in the US or Canada and let them make Whirlwinds instead of P-39s and Hurricanes.

To me it looks like an excellent design with a little bit of fine tuning needed. Clearly there were a couple of problems with the plane, but the truth is not many combat aircraft ever reached the point the Whirlwind did in their design cycle, i.e. useful and able to do damage to the enemy. To me that is the big glaring issue. Every new warplane design was a throw of the dice, you never knew if it would take 6 months or 4 years before the plane was really viable in combat. Whirlwind was already through the toughest stages of that cycle, it was going to be viable, it was just a matter of how much better it could be made. It is also clear that the Whirlwind had substantial room for improvement.

The amount of accidents may seem like a lot until you compare it with other fighters - particularly early in their history and especially with inexperienced pilots. P-40s had tons of accidents, look at the early days of it's use in Australia - just getting them to Darwin cost something like half of the available planes in accidents. P-39s had even more problems - killing quite a few aces and top pilots among US pilots as well as our Allies in Free French and Italian squadrons, and lets not even get started on P-38s. Shall we talk about the Typhoon? Even the P-51 and the wonderful de Havilland Mosquito were known to have a fair number of accidents, that didn't make either plane any less of a war-winning design. High performance combat aircraft were just challenging to fly and required good pilots to handle them. Many wartime pilots were insufficiently trained on high-performance plans and rarely got enough training on type. Until you knew all the quirks and 'gotchas' (including handling common mechanical problems and failures) you were taking big risks just flying these planes. Twin engine aircraft training specifically was also insufficient - and most fighters (including Whirlwind so far as I know) lacked two seat models for training. For new pilots there was a certain element of 'sink or swim' before they got through the learning curve.

It seems like it's hard for some to acknowledge that the planners made any mistakes, certainly we can see more clearly than they did with hindsight. They didn't know for example how much trouble they were going to have with the Typhoon. But the Whirlwind looks like a successful design.

 

[Schweik]

After all of this talk about alternative engines for the Whirly, I'd have it as a 1-engined A/C, with Merlin in the nose preferably.



Care to elaborate?



At 1150 cu in (19 liters), chances are very slim for the 14M to spawn something worthy. The HS 12Y have had almost twice the displacement.

Well, just looking at my model shelf - comparing the Whirlwind to other planes, the Breuget 693 is similar in size, and the engines look about the same diameter. Maybe a two row engine of the same size. I'm sure the British had something comparable I'm just not familiar enough with all the British engines to say which one(s) would be ideal.

The 12Y looks small enough too comparing the D.520 or Yak-1 to the Whirlwind.

 

[stona]

I've still yet to see any convincing evidence that the Whirlwind wouldn't have been a very useful replacement for the Typhoon for the first couple of years of that aircraft's career or that production resources were better spent building Defiants, Lysanders and Henleys. Or hell license the design to a firm in the US or Canada and let them make Whirlwinds instead of P-39s and Hurricanes.
.

Okay, for the last time, there were no engines for it.

The aircraft was designed and built around the Rolls-Royce Peregrine, by late 1939, a shortage of machinery and manpower forced Rolls-Royce to rationalise production and several engines were dropped. Thus when the first production Peregrine was delivered in February 1940 the decision had already been made to cease production after 290 units. To all intents, the Whirlwind was doomed from that point on.

This was the real world of wartime production.

 

[Schweik]

I guess that's why all the alternative engines were being discussed, right? There is nothing stopping another engine being fitted to a Whirlwind, it was done with most of the other twin engine RAF fighters at one time or another. But I also assume the War Ministry could have decided to continue production of the Peregrine, license it out to another firm (probably the best idea) or set up a 'shadow factory' and etc.

There is nothing written in stone that the Whirlwind needed to be cancelled when it was any more than they should have kept developing Defiants for another two years.

 

[Kevin J]

I've still yet to see any convincing evidence that the Whirlwind wouldn't have been a very useful replacement for the Typhoon for the first couple of years of that aircraft's career or that production resources were better spent building Defiants, Lysanders and Henleys. Or hell license the design to a firm in the US or Canada and let them make Whirlwinds instead of P-39s and Hurricanes.

To me it looks like an excellent design with a little bit of fine tuning needed. Clearly there were a couple of problems with the plane, but the truth is not many combat aircraft ever reached the point the Whirlwind did in their design cycle, i.e. useful and able to do damage to the enemy. To me that is the big glaring issue. Every new warplane design was a throw of the dice, you never knew if it would take 6 months or 4 years before the plane was really viable in combat. Whirlwind was already through the toughest stages of that cycle, it was going to be viable, it was just a matter of how much better it could be made. It is also clear that the Whirlwind had substantial room for improvement.

The amount of accidents may seem like a lot until you compare it with other fighters - particularly early in their history and especially with inexperienced pilots. P-40s had tons of accidents, look at the early days of it's use in Australia - just getting them to Darwin cost something like half of the available planes in accidents. P-39s had even more problems - killing quite a few aces and top pilots among US pilots as well as our Allies in Free French and Italian squadrons, and lets not even get started on P-38s. Shall we talk about the Typhoon? Even the P-51 and the wonderful de Havilland Mosquito were known to have a fair number of accidents, that didn't make either plane any less of a war-winning design. High performance combat aircraft were just challenging to fly and required good pilots to handle them. Many wartime pilots were insufficiently trained on high-performance plans and rarely got enough training on type. Until you knew all the quirks and 'gotchas' (including handling common mechanical problems and failures) you were taking big risks just flying these planes. Twin engine aircraft training specifically was also insufficient - and most fighters (including Whirlwind so far as I know) lacked two seat models for training. For new pilots there was a certain element of 'sink or swim' before they got through the learning curve.

It seems like it's hard for some to acknowledge that the planners made any mistakes, certainly we can see more clearly than they did with hindsight. They didn't know for example how much trouble they were going to have with the Typhoon. But the Whirlwind looks like a successful design.

Problem with all the alternative engine installations is that they are for engines with either limited development potential or limited numbers of applications, although a twin Taurus version would have worked okay in the Far East and SW Pacific until the end of the war in August 1945 without further engine development maybe even in NW Europe until 1943 against the FW 190A giving Hawkers time to cancel the Typhoon, prototype the Tempest in 1941 and get it into service in 1943.

 

[stona]

I guess that's why all the alternative engines were being discussed, right? There is nothing stopping another engine being fitted to a Whirlwind, it was done with most of the other twin engine RAF fighters at one time or another. But I also assume the War Ministry could have decided to continue production of the Peregrine, license it out to another firm (probably the best idea) or set up a 'shadow factory' and etc.

There is nothing written in stone that the Whirlwind needed to be cancelled when it was any more than they should have kept developing Defiants for another two years.

The Whirlwind was designed around the Peregrine.

It derivative of the Whirlwind with another engine would be another aircraft. When Petter tried to by-pass the Air Ministry and go straight to Fighter Command with his Merlin powered version he called it a Whirlwind II, but it was no such thing. The problems of completely redesigning the nacelles and undercarriage to accommodate the Merlin's up draught carburettor were never solved, despite what some would have you believe.

Once the Peregrine was cancelled the Whirlwind was a dead duck, it's a miracle that as many were produced as were historically. At another time, either side of 1939/40, it would not have happened.

There was never the slightest chance of the Peregrine being licensed to another firm. The relationship between Rolls Royce and the Air Ministry insured this. Remember that the policy of concentrating on the Merlin and deleting the Peregrine and Exe originated with the company, not the Ministry, and was adopted by the Ministry.
All the Rolls Royce factories were devoted to the Merlin, with the arguable exception of the parent in Derby which was, in Hives' words, 'a huge development factory rather than a manufacturing plant'. Crewe occupied an intermediate position and R-R Glasgow, Ford Manchester and Packard in the US churned out Merlins.

 

[Schweik]

Yeah I read that notion about limited usefulness of the Peregrine, I think in part this was due to the mentality that planes were going to have to get much bigger during the war, but as I pointed out upthread, it seems in hindsight that 'smaller is better' sometimes in aircraft design, so a small but (relatively) powerful engine did have it's uses.

The other thing is that the Peregrine seems, like the Whirlwind, to have come through the dicey / fraught parts of the design cycle. It was more or less a proven design which only needed some fine tuning, and had potential for further development. Even in it's 1939 / 1940 form however, it was useful for Whirlwinds.

I get the rationale in other words, I just don't buy it. If they were still making Merlin IIIs that were going into Henleys and Defiants, they could have made Peregrines somewhere for Whirlwinds. One Whirlwind was worth 4 Defiants.