Westland Wasp

The Westland Wasp was a small British turbine-powered anti-submarine helicopter built by Westland Helicopters for the Royal Navy, which needed an aircraft small enough to land on the deck of a frigate while carrying two homing torpedoes. It came from the same Saunders-Roe P.531 programme as the British Army's Westland Scout and was in essence a navalised Scout, with a distinctive four-wheeled castering undercarriage for pitching flight decks and a tail boom and rotor blades that fold for small hangars. The two pre-production aircraft first flew on 28 October 1962, and 133 Wasps were built in total, 98 of them for the Royal Navy, with exports to Brazil, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1982 Wasps launched from British ships fired AS.12 missiles at the Argentine submarine Santa Fe. The last Wasp was withdrawn from service in 1988.