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The Fairey Battle was a British single-engine light bomber built by the Fairey Aviation Company in the late 1930s for the Royal Air Force. The Battle was powered by the same Rolls-Royce Merlin piston engine that gave contemporary British fighters high performance; however, the Battle was weighed down with a three-man crew and a bomb load. Despite being a great improvement on the aircraft that preceded it, by the time it saw action it was slow, limited in range and highly vulnerable to both anti-aircraft fire and fighters with its single defensive .303 machine gun.〔Ethell 1995, p. 177.〕 During the "Phoney War", the Fairey Battle recorded the first RAF aerial victory of the Second World War but by May 1940 was suffering heavy losses of well over 50% per mission. By the end of 1940 the Battle had been withdrawn from combat service and relegated to training units overseas. For such prewar promise, the Battle was one of the most disappointing of all RAF aircraft.〔 ==Design and development== The original Fairey Battle was designed to Air Ministry Specification P.27/32 as a two-seat day bomber, to replace the ageing Hawker Hart and Hind biplane bombers, and to act as an insurance policy in case heavier bombers were banned by the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference.〔''Air International'' March 1981, p. 127.〕 At the time, Britain expected any future war would see France as its enemy and so the distance to Paris was a factor in determining the range it needed.〔Buttler, ''British Secret Projects: Fighters and Bombers 1935-1950'' 2005 Midland. p65〕 The Battle emerged as a single-engine, all-metal, low-wing cantilever monoplane, equipped with a retractable tail wheel landing gear.〔 Its clean design with its long and slim fuselage and cockpit for three (pilot, navigator and gunner) seated in tandem with a continuous glazed canopy, was similar to a large fighter rather than a bomber.〔("Fairey Battle - Designed for Mass Production." ) ''Flight International'', 19 August 1937, pp. 189–192.〕 The armament and crew were similar to the Blenheim: three crew, 1,000 lbs bombload and two machine guns, although the Battle was a single-engine bomber, with less horsepower available. The Battle's standard payload of four bombs was carried in cells inside the wings and an additional of bombs could be carried on underwing racks.〔''Air International'' March 1981, p. 128.〕 As the engine took up the nose area, the bomb aimer's position was under the wing centre section, sighted through a sliding panel in the floor of the fuselage using the Mk. VII Course Setting Bomb Sight. The prototype Battle first flew on 10 March 1936.〔Mason 1994, p. 285.〕 When the RAF embarked on the pre-war expansion programme, the Battle became a priority production target, with 2,419 ordered〔Moyes 1971, p. 120.〕 and an initial production order placed for 155 Battles built to Specification P.23/35. The first of these aircraft was completed at Hayes, Middlesex in June 1937 but all subsequent aircraft were built at Fairey's new factory at Heaton Chapel, Stockport〔Orbis 1985, p. 1693.〕 and tested at their Manchester (Ringway) facility. Subsequently the Shadow factory operated by Austin Motors at Longbridge manufactured 1,029 aircraft to Specification P.32/36. Total production was of 2,185 machines, as production lines were closed in advance, in September 1940.〔Matricardi 2006, p. 249.〕 Production Battles were powered by the Rolls-Royce Merlin I, II, III and V. Replacing the RAF's Hawker Harts and Hinds when it entered service in 1937, the Battle was obsolescent even then as fighter technology had outstripped the modest performance gains that the light bomber possessed over its biplane antecedents.〔Taylor 1969, p. 358.〕 The Battle was armed only with a single Browning .303 machine gun fixed ahead and with a trainable Vickers K in the back; this was desperately inadequate.〔 Moreover, it lacked an armoured cockpit and self-sealing fuel tank.〔Boyne 1994, p. 52.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fairey Battle」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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