This Week’s Hints to help you along:
- Ok, definitely seems British, actually. Yes, that’s right. Or is it?
- Note the interesting folding wing mechanism, attaching at the roots.
- Specially designed for operations from the decks of an aircraft carrier.
- Designed during WWII to improve on a previous design that was lacking.
- The plane would be rendered obsolete by the emergence of jets.
So do you know what this aircraft is?
Looks like the quite unlucky Blackburn B.48 Firecrest!
That’s one very fast answer…. Congratulations Nico on identifying a rather rare piece of iron!
Blackburn Firecrest
This definitely is a Hawker Sea Fury. A great plane with 4 20mm cannons that served in Korea and was the backbone of the British carrier fighter force until the jet fighters came along.
Yep, Nico, you’re right. I was mistaken by the five blade propellor.
This is one of the three Blackburn B-48 Firecrest Prototypes, two of which flew. The plane was designed to replace the Blackburn Firebrand TF MkV. The TF stood for “Torpedo Fighter”. I made quite a few parts for them, personally, as I was involved with the company at the time.
Yes, the plane was designed to launch a torpedo then get the H*** out of there fast and it was pretty fast for its day. I can remember the Firebrands performing at an airshow over the City of Hull in England in celebration of the end of WWII. They had torpedoes on too at that time.
A quick comment from the staff at HW — Roy Benstead was the source of the photo in this What’s That? feature. We wish to publicly thank him for his submission of the photo, which was previously unpublished and from his personal collection.