During the Second World War one of the most powerful inline piston engines was the British Napier Sabre, 24-cylinder piston engine in an H-block layout (imagine 2 flat 12-cylinder engines on top of each other) that in its first versions developed 2,200 horsepower and its late-war versions developed as much as 5,000 horsepower. The Sabre powered the Hawker Typhoon and Tempest fighter bombers but the first aircraft to use Napier's innovative engine flew for only a short time before the start of the Second World War. During the interwar period there was considerable national rivalry in setting aviation world records, one of which was unlimited speed record.

In 1934 the record was held by the Italians at 440.6 mph set with the Macchi-Castoldi MC.72 floatplane powered by a 24-cylinder Fiat engine. The British were aware that the Germans would making an attempt at the world speed record using the Daimler-Benz DB601-V12 engine that was under development and more advanced than any other engine of the day (the DB601 would go on and power the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter). The Napier Sabre team decided to build its own record-breaking aircraft powered by the Sabre engine. They had one of two p0ssible goals- to either wait for the Luftwaffe to set the record and then use their aircraft to break it right away or to fly and set a record that was so fast it couldn't be broken for years.

Rather unusually with with method, Napier selected the small light aircraft company Heston to build what would be called the Napier-Heston T.5 (for Type 5, the fifth type of Heston aircraft they had built). Heston was selected because they had an established reputation for fine woodwork in their aircraft- with wood being light, strong, and not needing rivets- some have called wood "God's composite material"- the wooden Heston design would be strong yet very light.

The aircraft was then finished with 20 coats of lacquer paint to a smooth finish and any scratch more than 0.0005 inches in depth was polished out in areas like the wing leading edges. George Cornwall, the chief designer from Heston, and Arthur Hagg, the lead Napier engineer on the project, created an aircraft of unparalleled smoothness and aerodynamic fineness. One of the key features of the T.5 was it's midfuselage belly radiator, the first aircraft to have one that would be echoed in the later North American P-51 Mustang. The belly scoop was designed to bleed off the turbulent boundary layer air to ensure a smooth airflow into the air scoop. After passing through the twin oil and glycol radiators, the air was exhausted on each side of the rudder via D-shaped exhaust ports. The cockpit canopy was a small, one piece blown perspex bubble similar to what is on today's Reno Unlimited Class racers.

The T.5 weighed in at 7,200 lbs, 2,900 lbs of which was the Napier Sabre engine- a staggering 40% of the aircraft's weight. By comparison, the P-51 Mustang weighed in at 9,200 lbs empty with its Merlin engine accounting for 1,645 lbs of that weight- only 18% of the total. For its flights, the Napier Sabre was tuned to produce 2,650 horsepower. As the British government was preoccupied with numerous military projects, the Napier-Heston T.5 would use private backing to make its record flight.

With delays in the ground runs and taxi tests, the T.5 finally took to the air on 12 June 1940. It had been just over a year since the Germans took the world record with the Messerschmitt Me 209 and its DB601 engine with a speed of 469.22 mph. The British were gunning for 480 mph with the T.5. With Heston's chief test pilot G. Richmond in the cockpit sans canopy, the first flight was planned to be a basic exploration of the aircraft's handling qualities. Five minutes into the flight, the engine was overheating and Richmond found the aircraft to be overly sensitive in pitch. Lacking the canopy, he was buffeted by the 200-mph slipstream. Then a broken radiator fitting scaled him with steam from the radiator. He hastily made for landing without a good idea of the aircraft's ideal landing speeds only to discover what the stall speed was when he was still 30 feet above the ground.

The T.5 pancaked into the ground, driving the landing gears through the wing. The tail broke off and Richmond survived with significant burns. No further attempts were made as one month later the Battle of Britain began. The T.5 had a total of six minutes of flying time.

Source: Aviation History, July 2010. "Built for Speed" by Stephan Wilkinson, p18-19.

It was a moment that not even Boeing, Douglas, or Lockheed could have envisioned taking place. In June 1955 in one of Capital Airlines' hangars at Washington National Airport, Patricia Nixon, wife of the US vice-president Richard Nixon, christened Capital's first Vickers Viscount, N7402 as Capital's president, Slim Carmichael and an enthusiastic crowd of dignitaries and employees looked on. In 1955 Capital was already an industry leader despite being only the fifth largest airline in the United States. It was the first airline to introduce low-fare no-frills services to the United States with its nightly "Air Coach" services that started in 1947, flying aircraft that otherwise would have sat unused at night waiting for the daytime regular full-fare services.

The introduction of the Viscount on Capital's network on 26 July 1955 between Washington DC and Chicago marked the first US scheduled turbine passenger services and it was on an aircraft that wasn't built in Seattle, Long Beach, or Burbank. Vickers pulled off a sensational coup with the Capital sale and at the time, the order for sixty Viscounts represented the largest single post-war dollar sale for Great Britain, worth $67 million. BEA was even talked into giving three early delivery spots to allow Capital to the first to operate turbine services in the United States with the Viscount. BEA and Vickers invested heavily in getting Capital prepared to operate the Viscount.

Fortunately for Vickers, the changes needed to get US certification for the Viscount had already been accomplished in getting the order for Trans-Canada Airlines the year before. While there were still modifications needed to meet US certification and Capital's own requirements, the majority of the work had already been done to meet TCA's requirements and that of Canadian certification.

But it would all come crashing down for Capital only six years later. Three factors would lead Capital to financial ruin and eventual merger with United Air Lines in 1961, but none of them were attributable (contrary to popular belief) to the performance of the Viscount itself. The first one was that Capital's route network consisted of many smaller communities and routes that were too short to be economical for the Viscount. Secondly, increasing competition from airlines like United that were introducing pure jets on the same longer range routes that were ideal for Capital's Viscounts resulted in their planes being flown faster to try to match the block times of the jets. As a result, maintenance costs on the aircraft and particularly the engines, increased dramatically as the aircraft were being pushed harder. Adding to the airline's woes were the crashes of four Viscounts between 1958 and 1960 that brought press attention to the airline's problems.

By 1960 Capital owed Vickers $34 million in outstanding payments on the Viscounts and they had to go to US court to file suit. Vickers was persuaded to take back 15 of the Viscounts while Capital came up with a restructuring plan that centered around ordering modern jet equipment in the form of the De Havilland Comet 4B while they successfully petitioned the Civil Aeronautics Board to gain more nonstop route authorities in their network and drop some of the more unprofitable destinations.

Unfortunately it was too little too late as Capital's large 1954 order for sixty Viscounts resulted in increasing interest payments that left the airline little financial flexibility. However, stoked by the press, the general public gained the impression that it was the Viscount itself that was causing Capital's problems when in fact their Viscounts were operating at an 80 percent load factor compared to 58% for the other types in the fleet. Break even on the Viscount for Capital was only 52%, so the aircraft was clearly a money maker for Capital, but it wasn't enough to stave off the large growing debt obligations from the large sixty aircraft order. On 1 July 1961 Capital's operations were merged into that of United Air Lines, but in a show of the aircraft's soundness, United retained the Viscounts in its fleet and even recalled some of the aircraft that Capital had returned to Vickers.
Source: Vickers Viscount and Vanguard by Malcolm L. Hill. Crowood Press Ltd, 2004, p40-48, 97-99.

Development of the Harrier Ski-Jump

The development of the BAe Sea Harrier FRS.1 and the ski-jump are closely intertwined and the discussion one almost always leads to the discussion of the other. Hawker-Siddeley Aircraft, one of BAe's predecessor companies, had studied a naval Harrier variant as far back as 1969 as the P.1184 Maritime Harrier. When the Royal Navy awarded HSA a contract for naval Harrier variant in 1972, financial austerity was the watch word of the day in the British government and though based in part on the P.1184 Maritime Harrier, what would become the Sea Harrier FRS.1 would be a far less radical departure and minimum-change version of the land-based RAF Harrier GR.1.

In 1973 Royal Navy Lt. Commander David Taylor first formulated the ski-jump concept for V/STOL aircraft in the same class as the Harrier. His work was further developed in cooperation with the Hawker's Kingston division and the Ministry of Defence in sophisticated computer models followed by actual flight testing with an adjustable ski-jump built by HSA at the Royal Aircraft Establishment's main testing facility at Bedford.

One of the ski-jump's biggest proponents was John Farley, HSA's chief test pilot for the Harrier and Sea Harrier programs. During his test flights with early Harrier GR.1s off the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, he found that there were certain moments in the pitching and heaving of a carrier deck in rough seas that could play havoc with a fully-loaded Sea Harrier making an STOL run off the carrier deck. In fact, tests had shown that in some sea conditions, as little as 5 degrees of deck angle up or down either at the stern or bow could shut down flight operations completely.

Farley also noted that in a pitching carrier deck, the most stable point to land in VTOL mode was the center of the deck as the ship virtually pivoted about that point in rough seas. Ideally, a fully-loaded Sea Harrier without a ski-jump would need the full-length of the deck to take off, but this meant that launching and recovery flight operations couldn't be simultaneously undertaken. Testing with the ground-based ski-jump at RAE Bedford showed that a shorter takeoff run would be needed, allowing the forward half of the deck to be used for launching aircraft off the ski-jump and from the midpoint back used for recovery of Sea Harriers.

Farley himself made the first takeoff from the ski-jump at RAE Bedford on 5 August 1977 with the sixth production Harrier GR.1. The first series of tests had the ramp set at 6 degrees, then moved it up to 12 degrees and then finally to 20 degrees. With the ramp at its steepest 20 degree setting, Farley could get a Harrier airborne with as little as 42 knots of airspeed as the ramp provided a significant upward velocity vector that allowed the pilot time to pivot the nozzles back, clean up the aircraft and depart in nearly all but the worst sea conditions. In addition, should an emergency occur on takeoff from a ski-jump, there was valuable time to either jettison the stores or eject.

Testing further showed that the ski-jump reduced required wind-over-deck speed. As the upcoming Invincible class "Harrier carriers" were gas turbine powered, not needing higher speeds to achieve ideal wind-over-deck speeds meant a more inexpensive and less powerful powerplant would be needed for the ship, an added bonus in the atmosphere of financial austerity of the day.

It was also found that as the aircraft reached the ski-jump, there was a rapid increase in loading on the undercarriage and as a result, the design of the Sea Harrier was modified to incorporate structural reinforcement around the aft main undercarriage just below the blast deflectors of the aft nozzles.

The trials at RAE Bedford were tremendously successful and a 7 degree ski-jump was added to the already-completed HMS Invincible and to the HMS Illustrious. The lower-than-ideal angle was due to the presence of the forward Sea Dart SAM launcher on the bow. The last ship of the class, HMS Ark Royal, wasn't finished until 1985 an as such, it got a 40-foot deck extension and a 12 degree ski-jump, allowing it to launch a fully-loaded Sea Harrier. In 1986 the Invincible and Illustrious had their ski-jumps refitted to the same standard as the Ark Royal. In addition, when the HMS Hermes underwent its refit in 1979 from an assault carrier to one compatible with the Sea Harrier, it got a 12 degree ski-jump as well. The ski-jumps were crucial to Harrier GR.3 and Sea Harrier FRS.1 operations in the Falklands campaign in 1982.

The sea trials for the Sea Harrier FRS.1 began in October 1979 aboard the HMS Hermes and the first operational sea deployment took place in May 1980 aboard the HMS Invincible.

Source: BAe Sea Harrier (Warpaint Series No. 75) by Kev Darling. Warpaint Books Ltd, 2010, p1-8.

Several weeks after the disastrous Munich Pact was signed in 1938, the British Air Ministry initiated a massive expansion of the Royal Air Force in anticipation of the coming war. As the planned expansion was beyond the capacity of British aircraft factories at the time, the Air Ministry also looked abroad at foreign sources of aircraft to meet the needs of an expanding RAF. In January 1939, Air Ministry representatives visited the Caproni factory in Milan, Italy to examine the Caproni Ca 310 light twin which had potential as a crew trainer. Surprisingly, in light of the European tensions at the time, the visit by the British was officially sanctioned by the Italian government.

Though no contracts were signed, the interest was significant as high-ranking officials with the Air Ministry visited Caproni again in December of that year (and I should note that the Second World War had already started in September 1939 but Italy had yet to declare war on the Allies) and informed Count Caproni himself that the RAF wished to acquire 200 Ca 310s and a further 300 examples of a more powerful derivative under development, the Ca 313. The French had already placed orders for 200 Ca 313s in September 1939.

In January 1940, an Italian delegation from Caproni arrived at the Air Ministry's headquarters in England to finalize the purchase of the Caproni twins. The RAF submitted a series of changes they wanted on their aircraft and in exchange, RAF representatives were dispatched to the Caproni factory to oversee the RAF-specific modifications. The purchase was confirmed by the end of that month and the aircraft were to be partially-completed in Milan and then shipped to France where the RAF operated out of the airfield at Istres. At Istres the Caproni aircraft would be completed, flight tested, and flown to the UK.

If things weren't surreal already with this deal, the Italian government notified the Nazis that Caproni had a sizeable order on the books with the French and British and if there were any objections in light of the close relationship between Mussolini and Hitler. Surprisingly, the Germans in March 1940 indicated that they had no objections to the deal! However, a month later the Germans indicated that the contracts should be canceled. Count Caproni himself met with the heads of the Air Ministry and arranged for the aircraft ordered to be "completed" by Caproni's subsidiary in Portugal and the UK would then "buy" the aircraft from Portugal instead of the Italians.

However, on 10 June 1940, with France near defeat, Italy declared war on Great Britain which effectively canceled what at the time was the largest aircraft contract ever received by the Italian aircraft industry. It proved to be fortuitous for the Royal Air Force, though. Sweden did take delivery of a substantial number of the Caproni Ca 310/313s and found them to have unreliable engines and poor build quality. The fuel lines to the engines ran right next to the exhaust stacks for the engines which resulted in the Caproni twin having a reputation for being highly flammable. After local modifications to hold the aircraft over until replaced by Saab designs, the Caproni twin was quite robust, but nearly fifty Flygvapen personnel lost their lives in accidents due to the technical deficiencies of the Ca 310/313.

Source: Air Enthusiast, Volume One, William Green, managing editor, Gordon Swanborough, editor. Pilot Press Ltd, 1971, p95-99.

The First Torpedo Bomber: The Shorts 184 of the First World War

Captain Murray F. Sueter, Director of the Air Department of the Admiralty of the Royal Navy, was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of British naval aviation during the First World War. One of his most passionate causes was championing naval torpedo bombers, though in those days a "proper" torpedo bomber was felt to be a seaplane. Working with the Short Brothers, a large two-seat biplane called the Short Type 184 was produced in significant numbers (650 in all) during the First World War. With a pilot and observer and floats, the 225-horsepower Short 184 was the first reliable torpedo bomber to not only go into production, but to prove itself in combat.

Despite successful tests showing that it was possible to air drop a torpedo against a surface vessel, Captain Sueter's ideas got little support within the Admiralty. However, he was given a chance to prove his theories with the Short 184 during the disastrous Dardenelles Campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula against Turkey in 1915. Four Short 184s were embarked aboard a converted steam packet to serve as a seaplane tender, arriving on station in the northern Aegean Sea in June 1915.

On 12 August 1915, Flight Commander C.H.K. Edmonds and his observer flew a Short 184 carrying a single torpedo toward the Straits of the Dardanelles. Sighting a Turkish freighter in the Sea of Marmara that was carrying 3,000 Turkish troops to reinforce the Gallipoli Peninsula, Edmonds slowly descended from 800 feet to only 15 feet and closed within 300 feet of the vessel before releasing his torpedo, which struck the troop transport amidships, making the world's first successful combat aerial torpedo attack.

Five days later Edmonds and his observer again sortied in their torpedo-armed Short 184 along with a second Short 184 piloted by Flight Lieutenant G.B. Dacre. Approaching the Turkish coast at low altitude, both aircraft came under ground fire from Turkish gun batteries on the coast. Weaving at low altitude, Edmonds sighted three Turkish merchant ships and homed in on the largest of the three vessels, again descending to near-wavetop height for torpedo release, scoring a direct hit that set the vessel ablaze.

Edmonds' wingman found himself forced down due to an engine failure. While on the water getting his engine re-started, Dacre noticed a Turkish steam tug cross his nose and he fired his torpedo while still sitting in the water. The torpedo hit the tug squarely and sank it immediately. Having finally gotten his engine restarted, Dacre nursed his Short 184 into the air under heavy fire.

Despite this success, the Admiralty remained lukewarm to Sueter's ideas. He had requested a force of 200 torpedo bombers to act in conjunction with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea in action against the German High Seas Fleet, but his ideas were considered too radical and risky for the Royal Navy. Sueter then proposed using the Short 184 to attack the High Seas Fleet at anchor at Wilhelmshaven, but again was rejected. He then proposed an attack on the Austro-Hungarian fleet at its naval bases on the Adriatic- he managed to win over the First Sea Lord, Earl Jellicoe, who approved the deployment of Short 184s to a seaplane base in Italy to attack the Austro-Hungarian fleet at anchor at its main harbor base in Pola.

The attack was to take place on 2 September 1917 but on the eve of the operation a storm arose and the aircraft were unable to depart. The attack was postponed indefinitely and not resurrected before the war ended in 1918 as many in the Royal Navy felt that the seaplanes were better used for scouting and reconnaissance than for attacks on surface vessels.

Source: Ship Strike: The History of Air-to-Sea Weapons Systems by Peter C. Smith. Airlife Publishing, 1998, p9-12.

When the Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat made its maiden flight in August 1952, the engineers who designed it were well aware of the rise of the pure jet and had already been at work on a pure jet-powered successor to the Princess, the Saunders-Roe Duchess. With a cruising speed of 500mph and accommodating 74 passengers, the Duchess was to be powered by six De Havilland Ghost engines buried in the wing roots.

The Duchess would have had a wingspan of 124 feet and a gross takeoff weight of 130,000 pounds. The slight anhedral of the wings allowed for wingtip floats installed in a similar manner to the Martin P6M Seamaster. The 74 passengers were carried in forward and aft cabins with four-abreast seating and a cargo compartment in the center fuselage where the jet noise would have been the loudest in the cabin. Having the cargo compartment at the center of gravity also eased some design issues in the Duchess. The anticipated range of the Duchess would have been between 1,300 and 1,500 miles, modest when compared with what Boeing and Douglas were offering on their soon-to-arrive designs.


Unfortunately for Saunders-Roe, the impending arrival of the high-performance land-based jetliners from Boeing and Douglas would eclipse the Duchess with higher speeds and greater passenger and cargo capacity. Tasman Empire Airways had expressed significant interest in the Duchess, though, as a passenger jet seaplane would have been ideal on its routes amongst the smaller islands between Australia and New Zeland. However, interest from a single operator wasn't enough to bring the Duchess into production. It would not be until 1998 that a passenger-carrying jet seaplane would take to the air with the Beriev Be-200.
Source: An Illustrated History of Seaplanes and Flying Boats by Maurice Allward. Barnes and Noble Books, 1993, p129.

Early combat aircraft of the First World War were often fragile contraptions not ideally suited to the rigors of sustained aerial maneuvering. In Britain, Herbert Smith of the Sopwith Aviation Company designed a new biplane based on an earlier design, the Sigrist Bus (named for the manager of the Sopwith factory, Fred Sigrist), that never went into production. In most contemporary biplane designs, the two upper wings were joined by a central section. Support struts attached to the upper longerons of the fuselage to the ends of the central section and usually a second set of struts were attached to the inner part of the outer wings connected to an outer set of longerons on the fuselage.

In the new two-seat Sopwith design, there was no central section and the two upper wings were joined together. A W-shaped set of struts supported the upper wing of the biplane to the fuselage longerons and were considered "one and a half set of struts" instead of two sets of struts, which led to the new Sopwith's name, the 1 1/2 Strutter. The one and a half strut layout gave the upper wing tremendous rigidity like a railroad trestle.

But more remarkably in the Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter, it introduced two features that are now commonplace on modern aircraft.

The first innovation was a variable-incidence horizontal stabilizer. The front spar of the tailplane was hinged on the rear fuselage and a worm gear actuated by a set of cables linked to a handwheel in the cockpit allowed the pilot to adjust the trim of the entire stabilizer. At a neutral setting, the tailplane was angled +2 degrees and the worm gear allowed the pilot to move the entire assembly more or less from that neutral setting depending upon the flying conditions.

The other innovation on the 1 1/2 Strutter were airbrakes on the trailing edge root of the lower wing. Pivoted at about quarter chord on each side, the airbrakes were operated by another handwheel in the cockpit that linked to a set of cables that raised the airbrakes up to 90 degrees upward and could be locked into position by the pilot. As the 1 1/2 Strutter had relatively clean lines for the day, it had a flat gliding angle and high landing speed (most aircraft of the day didn't have flaps) and the airbrakes were used to assist with the descent and landing.

Source: Aeroplane Monthly, December 2009. "Aeroplane Database: Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter" by Philip Jarrett, p56-70.

Although the Bristol Type 167 Brabazon is often labeled as a "white elephant", the aircraft had many milestones for commercial aviation and set the foundation for bigger successes by the British aviation industry than is widely known. The Brabazon design first originated as a bomber design to meet the Air Staff specification B.8/41 which laid down the features and performance of a very large bomber similar in class to the Convair B-36 Peacemaker. B.8/41 asked for a range of 5,000 miles with a speed of 300mph capable of reaching Russia or Japan. Bristol's design had an all-up weight of 225,000 lbs and a 225-foot wingspan. The project never got pursued, though, as the RAF preferred increased production of the Avro Lancaster.

When Lord Brabazon convened his famous committee to determine the course of British commercial aviation post-war to compete with the Americans, the Bristol bomber design was adopted for the Type I role, that of a large trans-Atlantic airliner with an anticipated service date of 1948. It was christened Brabazon in honor of the committee chairman himself.

When work began at Bristol's Filton works, the runway was 2,000 feet too short and had to be extended for the anticipated flight test program of the Brabazon. Despite local protests and the need for Cabinet approval to start work on the runway, when completed along with a massive assembly hall, it became the longest runway in Europe.

There were four features in particular that were commercial aviation milestones in the design of the Brabazon. It was the first aircraft to be designed from the outset to have 100% fully-powered flying controls, the first commercial aircraft designed to have a high pressure hydraulic system (the higher the pressure, the lighter the hydraulic system), and the first aircraft to have electric engine controls (electric control of engine power and mixture would lay down the foundation for modern FADEC systems). But most significantly yet little known, the Brabazon was the first airliner to be designed with cabin pressurization and air conditioning, and that pressurization was set at 8'000 above sea level, the current standard for modern airliners.

By 1949 the Brabazon was still in flight test and the De Havilland Comet prototype had just flown and BOAC was already using the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser on the trans-Atlantic routes intended for the Brabazon. In 1953 the project was canceled (despite the design of the Brabazon Mk.2 which used Proteus turboprops instead of the Centaurus radials of the prototype), but the expertise gained by Bristol formed the foundation for the more successful Bristol Britannia and when Bristol became part of the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960, the Filton works and its long runway and large assembly hall would be used for the Concorde program.

Source: Airliner Classics, November 2009. "The Bristol Brabazon: White Elephant or Technological Marvel?" by Gerry Sweet, p53-58

In 1957 the last of the Auster liason aircraft were retired from the Royal Air Force with great reluctance. The British Army, however, keen to replace the unique capabilities of the Auster with the de Havilland Beaver, came up against a government limit on the size of aircraft the Army Air Corps could operate- 4000 lbs. Anything larger was to be operated by the RAF. However, the AAC wasn't deterred by this regulation and managed to get a waiver to allow them to order 46 DHC-2 Beavers delivered from 1960-1967. No other type of aircraft was even considered.

However, as early as 1952 de Havilland Canada was considering a British-built Beaver. The 550 horsepower Alvis Leonides radial, already in use with the Percival Provost and Percival Pembroke twin engine communications aircraft, offered 100 more horsepower for an additional weight of 98 lbs. One of the engines was shipped to de Havilland's plant in Downsview (Toronto) for testing on a Beaver. Aircraft CF-GOE-X was fitted with a longer nose cowling to accommodate the Leonides engine which drove a larger three-bladed propeller. The vertical fin required redesign with a taller design with straight leading and trailing edges and more dorsal fin fillet area.

The Leonides Beaver (also known as the Beaver Mk.2) first flew at Downsview on 10 March 1953 and demonstrated improvements in top speeds and time-to-climb. However, the cost of the conversion outweighed the additional performance and the British Army Air Corps ended up ordering standard Wasp Junior-powered Beavers. During flight testing in Britain, the AAC even landed one of their Beavers on a Royal Navy carrier deck.

Source: The Immortal Beaver- The World's Greatest Bush Plane by Sean Rossiter. Douglas & McIntyre, 1996, p104-106

The first monoplane bomber to enter RAF service was the Fairey Hendon when it become operational in 1936 with No. 38 Squadron at RAF Marham, beating the Handley Page Harrow by just a few months. At a time when aviation technology was rapidly improving, the Hendon took nearly six years to develop and when it entered service, it was so hopelessly antiquated that only 14 aircraft were built and were rapidly replaced in operational service by Vickers Wellingtons.

Despite being a twin-engined aircraft, the wingspan of the Hendon was only 3 inches less than that of the Avro Lancaster yet a single engine on the Lancaster had more horsepower than both of the 600 hp engines of the Hendon. The Hendon's performance was only marginally better than the Handley Page Heyford biplane bomber it replaced.
Source: Military Aircraft Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 7. "...Peace in Our Time..." by Martin Derry, p14.

The Black Arrow was planned as an inexpensive satellite launcher based on the technology of the earlier British Black Knight sounding rocket. Black Arrow would have given the United Kingdom an independent satellite launch capability. The first Black Arrow launch took place in June 1969, but the rocket veered off course. The second test eight months later went smoothly leading the way for Britain's first satellite launch attempt in September 1970. But this launch failed when the Black Arrow's second stage failed to fire.

In July 1971 the UK government canceled the Black Arrow but permission was given for one more launch on 28 October 1971 which put Britain's first satellite, Prospero, into orbit. However there would be no other launches or development and Britain henceforth limited its space activities with involvement in the European Space Agency, making the UK the first and only nation to abandon satellite launch capability.

Source: Spaceflight: The Complete Story from Sputnik to Shuttle and Beyond by Giles Sparrow. DK Limited, 2007, p56-57.