The Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft

392 Pages·2003·34.939 MB·English

by  Robert Jackson

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
MILITARY
AIRCRAFT
OVER 650 ENTRIES FROM 1914 TO THE PRESENT DAY
ROBERT JACKSON

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
MILITARY
AIRCRAFT
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofmiOOOOjack
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
MILITARY
AIRCRAFT
ROBERT JACKSON
This is a Parragon Publishing Book
First published in 2002
Parragon Publishing
Queen Street House
4 Queen Street
Bath BA1 1HE, UK
Copyright © Parragon 2002
ISBN 0-75258-131-7
Editorial and design by
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All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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A copy of the CIP data for this book is available in the British Library.
Printed in China
Contents
Introduction 6 Latecoere to LVG 226
AEG to Avro Canada 8 Macchi to Myasischchev 245
BAC to British Aerospace 38 Nakajima to Northrop 282
Canadair to Curtiss-Wright 79 Panavia to PZL 304
Dassault to Douglas 102 Reggiane to Ryan 313
Eurofighter to Friedrichshafen 129 Saab to Supermarine 324
General Dynamics to Grumman 162 Tachikawa to Tupolev 353
Halberstaclt to Blunting Percival 178 Vickers to Vultee 361
IAe to Junkers 206 Westland to Zeppelin-Staaken 369
Kawanishi to Kyushu 218 Index 379
6 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MILITARY AIRCRAFT
I INTRODUCTION
'
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▲ The Grumman F-14 Tomcat has seen action in the Gulf War, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, and in the 1980s was involved In several clashes over Libya.
On January 19, 1910, Lieutenant Paul Beck of the US Army found ability to use the whole aircraft as an aiming platform
released sandbags, representing bombs, over Los Angeles came a scientific approach to aerial fighting; experienced
from an airplane flown by pioneer aviator Louis Paulhan, pilots began to formulate tactics and combat maneuvers that
and on June 30, Glenn H. Curtiss dropped dummy bombs formed the principles on which future air combat would be
from a height of 50ft (15m) in an area representing the shape based. Such were the technological strides made during four
of a battleship, marked by buoys on Lake Keuka. The feasi¬ years of war that the aircraft evolved from a flimsy, unreliable
bility of discharging firearms from an aircraft was also machine barely capable of crossing the English Channel into
demonstrated on August 20, 1910, when US Army a heavy bomber capable of attacking the German capital,
Lieutenant Jacob Earl Fickel fired a 0.30-in (7.62-mm) cal¬ Berlin, from bases in eastern England.
iber rifle at a ground target at Sheepshead Bay, New York. Progress followed several diverse paths of air warfare; by
Such were the humble beginnings of military aviation, 1918 the world’s first strategic bombing forces were opera¬
the first steps on the path that would lead to the stealth tional, and the fighting airplane had gone to sea on the first
bombers, the air superiority fighters, and the vertical takeoff custom-made aircraft carrier. By the time hostilities ended in
combat aircraft of today, with all their awesome striking November 1918, air power had become a major factor in the
power.
By 1910, the air arms of the world’s major powers were
beginning to take shape. When Europe became embroiled in
war four years later, the value of the aircraft as an instrument
of reconnaissance was soon established, and it was the need
to deny this vital element of air reconnaissance to the enemy
that led directly to the birth of the fighting airplane, armed
with one or more machine guns. Warfare breeds new tech¬
nology, and the single most important technological devel¬
opment in the air war of 1914-18 was the development, in
1915, of the synchronized machine gun, enabling the weapon
to fire forward through the propeller disk. With this new-
' The Avro Lancaster was one of the most successful bombers of WWII.
These aircraft of No. 50 Squadron were pictured in August 1942.