Aviation and Military History
Early in 1952, Dassault received a contract from the French air ministry – which was becoming concerned about the increasing cost of modern fighters – to study the feasibility of a lightweight fighter in the form of a delta-winged variant of its Mystère fighter. The company accordingly began preliminary work on such a concept under the …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut – the Dassault MD.550 Mirage”
The British company which secured a measure of fame as Folland Aircraft Ltd originated as the British Marine Aircraft Ltd in August 1935, but assumed its definitive name from Henry Folland when that distinguished aircraft designer left Gloster in 1937 to form his own company at the BMA’s premises at Hamble in Hampshire. Following the …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut – the Folland Midge”
For the Canadian aviation industry, and for Avro Canada in particular, the traumatic story of the CF-105 Arrow was paralleled by that of the contemporary British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2 in the UK. Both of these formidable warplane types were destroyed before entering production by inflexible policies formulated by politicians who, in 1957, were convinced that …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut – the Avro Canada CF-105”
One of the small number of companies which expressed some interest in the British preliminary Specification F.124D for a rocket-powered interceptor was Saunders-Roe Ltd, which opted to prepare the design of a mixed-power fighter to Specification F.138D. Unlike the Avro Type 720, the SR.53, designed by Maurice Joseph Brennan, was of orthodox construction and employed …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut: the Saunders-Roe SR.53”
A particular feature of the turbojet-engined warplanes which evolved in the late 1940s and early 1950s was their steadily increasing combination of power and performance. This was seen as useful as it improved such warplanes’ overall operational capabilities, but on the other side of the coin, there was the less attractive combined feature of greater …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut – the Breguet Br.100 Taon”
France was occupied by German forces during a large part of World War II, and after the country’s liberation the first priority of the revived French air force was to rebuild its strength and overall capabilities with warplanes that were, for political as well as economic reasons, to be of French design and powered, wherever …
Continue reading “Fighters that did not make the cut – the Sud-Est SE.5000 Baroudeur”
The comparatively small type of monitor intended for use on rivers and larger wetlands is well protected and, in general, carried the largest-calibre guns of any riverine warship. On 18 December 1965, as its major commitment to the Vietnam War was in its early stages, the US Navy decided to create a ‘brown-water navy’ for …
The US Army’s first useful self-propelled anti-aircraft gun mounting was the M19 Gun Motor Carriage based on the chassis of the M24 Chaffee. The turret of this manually operated system, armed with two 40-mm Bofors guns, was later modified and installed on the chassis of the M41 Walker Bulldog light tank to produce the M42 …
By the mid-1950s, it was clear that the days of the ZSU-57-2 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun mounting were numbered in terms of the system’s operational capability. For all the destructive effect of its large projectiles, the S-68 cannon possessed too low a rate of fire; the poor rates of traverse and elevation made it all but …
Continue reading “The Soviet/Russian ZSU-23-4 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft mounting”
Occupying the technical and operational border between the heavy and the super-heavy tank, the FV 214 Conqueror was also known as the Tank, Heavy No. 1, 120 mm Gun, Conqueror, and was a British heavy tank developed in the period after World War II which was only built in modest numbers. The spur for the …
Continue reading “The heavy tank – the British FV 214 Conqueror”