Fairey Battle

The Fairey Battle was a British single-engine, three-seat light bomber designed and built by the Fairey Aviation Company in the mid-1930s as a monoplane successor to the Hawker Hart and Hind biplanes. It used the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine as the Hurricane and Spitfire, but with a three-man crew and a bomb load it was much heavier and slower than those fighters. The first Fairey prototype flew at Hayes on 10 March 1936 and the first production aircraft followed in June 1937. Its slow speed, limited range and defensive armament of only two machine guns left it very vulnerable. In the Phoney War it scored the first aerial victory of an RAF aircraft in the conflict, but on 10 to 14 May 1940 the Battles of the Advanced Air Striking Force often lost more than half the aircraft on a mission, and by the end of 1940 the type had been withdrawn from front-line bomber service. Fairey built 1,156 and the Austin Motor Company a further 1,029.