Westland C.O.W. Gun Fighter

The Westland C.O.W. Gun Fighter was a British experimental fighter built to carry a heavy calibre gun, the Coventry Ordnance Works 37 mm automatic gun that had been developed for aircraft use some years earlier. It answered Air Ministry specification F.29/27 and reused a design that Westland had already offered for specification F.20/27 as the Westland Interceptor, which lost out to the Gloster Gauntlet. It was an open cockpit, single engined metal monoplane with fabric covering, and its gun sat in the fuselage and fired upward at an angle so that it could attack bombers from below, a concept similar to the later German Schraege Musik system. The aircraft first flew at the end of 1930, but the trials did not give satisfactory results and the idea was not pursued further.