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A heavy fighter is a fighter aircraft designed to carry heavier weapons or operate at longer ranges. To achieve acceptable performance, most heavy fighters were twin-engined, and many had multi-place crews. The twin-engine heavy fighter was a major design class during the pre-World War II period. Conceived as long-range escort fighters, or heavily armed bomber destroyers, heavy fighters largely failed in their intended roles during World War II, as they could not outmaneuver the more conventional, single-engined fighters. Many twin-engined heavy fighters eventually found their niche as night fighters, with considerable successes. Only the Northrop P-61 Black Widow of the USAAF was ever built from the start, during the World War II era, solely to be a night fighter. ==Germany== A major heavy fighter design was the Messerschmitt Bf 110, a German fighter that, prior to the war, the Luftwaffe considered more important than their single-engine fighters. Many of the best pilots were assigned to Bf 110 wings, and were specifically designated as ''Zerstörergeschwader'' ("destroyer") wings. While other, lighter, fighters were mainly intended for defense, the destroyers were the ones mainly intended for offensive missions: to escort bombers on missions at long range, then use its superior speed to outrun defending fighters that would be capable of outmaneuvering it. This doctrine proved to be a costly mistake. In practice the Bf 110 was only capable of using this combination of features for a short time, until the late summer of 1940. It served well against the Hawker Hurricane during the Battle of France, but was easily outperformed by – and up to 50 km/h (31 mph) slower in top speed than – the Supermarine Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. Eventually Bf 110s were converted to interceptors, and were particularly successful in the later marks of the Bf 110G series from 1942/3 onwards as night fighters, serving as the primary aircraft of multiple Luftwaffe ''Nachtjagdgeschwader'' night fighter wings, using multiple versions of the Lichtenstein radar for nocturnal interception of RAF Bomber Command heavy bombers, as well as finding some use as ground-attack aircraft. The Me 210 and Me 410 ''Hornisse'' were all-new aircraft designs meant to replace the Bf 110, but also could not outrun contemporary single-engine fighters, with the Me 210 having serious aerodynamic problems from mistakes in the design of its wing planform and the initial design of its rear fuselage. Towards the end of the war, the Dornier Do 335 ''Pfeil'' could have been an ideal twin-engined ''Zerstörer'' fighter design for the Luftwaffe due to its centre line thrust format, which placed its fuselage-mounted twin DB 603 engines' propellers on opposing ends of the fuselage, and potentially allowed much better maneuverability, while essentially using the same engines as the conventional-layout twin engined Me 410. The centre-line thrust design of the Do 335, the first-ever front-line combat fighter to use it, did allow dramatically higher speeds (just over 750 km/h or 465 mph), than any other twin-piston-engined aircraft of its era, but like so many other advanced German aircraft designs that were actually produced by Germany late in the war, the Do 335 never had the chance to be produced in quantity. Following the example set by the Bf 110, the Japanese built the broadly similar Kawasaki Ki-45 ''Toryu''. Likewise neutral Netherlands built the twin-boom Fokker G.I, only to be seized by the ''Luftwaffe'' after the German invasion of the Netherlands. 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「heavy fighter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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