The Boulton Paul Bittern was a 1920s
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
night-fighter
A night fighter (also known as all-weather fighter or all-weather interceptor for a period of time after the Second World War) is a fighter aircraft adapted for use at night or in other times of bad visibility. Night fighters began to be used ...
aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engine ...
built by
Boulton Paul Limited of
Norwich
Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...
, named after the
marsh bird of the same name.
Design and development
Designed to
Air Ministry Specification
This is a partial list of the British Air Ministry (AM) specifications for aircraft. A specification stemmed from an Operational Requirement, abbreviated "OR", describing what the aircraft would be used for. This in turn led to the specification ...
27/24, which called for a single-seat night fighter for use against enemy
bomber
A bomber is a military combat aircraft designed to attack ground and naval targets by dropping air-to-ground weaponry (such as bombs), launching torpedoes, or deploying air-launched cruise missiles. The first use of bombs dropped from an air ...
aircraft, the Bittern design was unusual for its time in that it was a twin-
engined shoulder wing
monoplane
A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single mainplane, in contrast to a biplane or other types of multiplanes, which have multiple planes.
A monoplane has inherently the highest efficiency and lowest drag of any wing con ...
rather than a single-engine
biplane.
Two prototypes were built. The first was a cantilever wing design with the engines - 214 hp Armstrong-Siddeley Lynx - on the leading edge of the wing. However initial trials showed that the wing was too flexible and so wing struts were added fixed between the bottom of the fuselage and the engine installations. However this added weight and drag with a commensurate effect on performance. The second prototype had the engines suspended from the wings on the struts.
The first prototype had two fixed
.303 in (7.7 mm) Vickers machine gun
The Vickers machine gun or Vickers gun is a water-cooled .303 British (7.7 mm) machine gun produced by Vickers Limited, originally for the British Army. The gun was operated by a three-man crew but typically required more men to move and o ...
s mounted on the fuselage sides. In the second the guns were changed from Vickers to
Lewis guns mounted in swiveling barbettes on fuselage. These could be angled from 0-45° upwards so the fighter could attack bombers from below without having to put the aircraft into a climb. The wingspan of the second prototype was increased by about 5 ft (1.5 m).
Both were finished in dark green with "night black" undersides for their role as "Anti-Bomber Formation Fighters". The first prototype carried out full performance and armament trials at Martlesham Heath from March 1927; the second went through the same tests in April 1928. The A&AEE reports were favourable except that the top speed - 145 mph - was rather slow.
[Kinsey p52] More trials were carried out before they were returned to Boulton & Paul. They were flown by the manufacturer for a while longer before being broken up.
During testing performance was so poor that further development was abandoned.
Specifications (P.31 Bittern J7936)
See also
References
;Notes
;Bibliography
*
*
*
{{Boulton Paul aircraft
Bittern
Bitterns are birds belonging to the subfamily Botaurinae of the heron family Ardeidae. Bitterns tend to be shorter-necked and more secretive than other members of the family. They were called ''hæferblæte'' in Old English; the word "bittern ...
1920s British fighter aircraft
High-wing aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1927
Twin piston-engined tractor aircraft