Better British Aviation 1918-39

However, the parent company might transfer the Exe and two-stroke engines out to Napier to allow Rolls Royce to concentrate on the Griffon, Merlin, Peregrine and Vulture.

Does this mean the Vulture overcomes/never has its reliability issues that led to it being binned in OTL?

OTL's perigrine had limited growth potential and suffered reliability issues early on. With no competition from the Dagger, and more
resources in one company, perhaps the Peregrine is initially use in some F.5/34 projects like the Martin Baker MB2 right from the off.
 
There are going to be at least a dozen Supermarine Giants flying around powered by six R-R Buzzards, paving the way for the "R" engine. No need to militarize it. Just develop the Buzzard.
 
Good point, the Buzzard III (1933) outperformed the Perigrine (1938).
It will probably be quite long in the tooth come the war though.

The Perigrine will probably be binned, with the R (Raptor?) following on from the Buzzard
in lieu of the Vulture.
 
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Phase 3 - 1937-39 - Part 4 Flying Boats
ITTL the Empire Flying Boat was really the Short Sandringham and was built on the same production line with the same production tooling as the Sunderland.

Part of the reason why Short Brothers had the ability to build so many aircraft of the Sunderland family was due to the RAF and Imperial Airways ordering a larger number of aircraft of a single type, which allowed the firm to use larger scale production methods. Another reason for this was that it had a bigger factory in the middle of the 1930s. This was principally through building more aircraft for the civil market between 1925 and 1935.

{Delurking}
I'm afraid that's physically not possible, at least at Shorts. The Shorts flying boat factory on the Medway waterfront in Rochester was physically constrained in a narrow strip of land between the river and a cliff. Shorts were using effectively hand-building methods because there wasn't room for any other kind of production, certainly not a production line.

Nor is the Shorts Rochester Airport site a couple of miles away able to help, it doesn't go in until 1935 and the site is a couple of hundred feet above the river, with the access to the river between the two meaning going down either a steep, s-bending road, or down Rochester High Street or Corporation Street/the A2, the access from any of them for a Sunderland fuselage or wingset is nightmarish - with the High St/A2 you're talking about a constrained 90 degree turn 10 metres in front of Rochester bridge - the main London-Dover road.

If you want a bigger production area for Shorts, then they're going to need a new site, and building it on marshy creeks on either the Rochester or Strood sides of the river, or out on Hoo, are the only options. I think Oswald Short's going to take one look at that and say 'No, too much of a risk'.

You have two options. The first is to bring forward the creation of Short Brothers and Harland from 1936, first deliveries from the Belfast factory seem to have been Bristol Bombays in 1937. The complication here is it's an Air Ministry funded development, so you need either a reason for the Ministry to fund it earlier, or for Short's finances to be able to fund both Rochester Airport and Belfast simultaneously (unlikely IMO, and they absolutely need Rochester Airport). The other option is to have production split over Shorts, Saro, Supermarine and Blackburn, which is how the industry tended to work in those days, but at the cost of making production line construction less financially viable.
 
Another thought on aircraft development without sleeve valve engines:

The Vickers Venom used the aquilla which was a sleeve valve engine designed in 1934,
and the prototype was originally intended to be tested again with a mercury before the prototype crashed.
Maybe the Vickers fighter flies with the Mercury.
 
{Delurking}
If you want a bigger production area for Shorts, then they're going to need a new site, and building it on marshy creeks on either the Rochester or Strood sides of the river, or out on Hoo, are the only options. I think Oswald Short's going to take one look at that and say 'No, too much of a risk'.
Is that too much of a financial risk or too much of a technical risk? That is will his brand new state of the art factory sink back into the marshes the day after it opens?

Short Brothers seems to have built around 55 aircraft between 1924 and 1934. Plus refurbishment work on the D.H.9A and Felixstowe F.5 flying boat. ITTL the firm will be building 3 to 4 times the number of aircraft over the same period. Does it have the floor space to do that?

ITTL instead of 5 Calcuttas, 3 Kents and 2 Scylla landplanes for Imperial Airways I want it to build 80 large 4-engine flying boats for Imperial Airways, which would preferably to a monoplane design along the lines of the Knuckleduster. That instantly brings the total up from 55 to 125.

I'm trying to avoid turning this into a wank by not throwing money at the RAF between 1919 and 1935 but I am considering doubling the number of flying boats and amphibians it buys. Chiefly that means buying about 160 Supermarine Southamptons instead of 80. So while I am at it is Supermarine's factory large enough to build twice as many aircraft between 1925 and 1935? Because it mainly built flying boats and amphibians.

But it would also mean 18 Iris/Perth bought from Blackburn and 12 Rangoons from Shorts. EXCEPT that I want the RAF to buy 30 military versions of the Short 4-engine monoplane flying boat, which would bring the total built by Shorts up to 149 and 110 of them would be of a single type.
 
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Phase 3 - 1937-39 - Part 4 Flying Boats

ITTL Short Brothers built a big six-engine monoplane instead of the Sarafand. It did not go into production because the Imperial Airways contract went to the Supermarine Type 179.

I wanted to make the Singapore Mk II the TTL Sunderland prototype, but I thought that was pushing things too far. Therefore ITTL the Short Sunderland prototype was built to Specification R.24/31 in place of the OTL Knuckleduster.

I think this is confused over the origin of the Sarafand, which was a military type (with civil potential). Oswald Short thought he could build an aircraft with better performance than the Dornier Do.X at a fraction of the size, and that this would be imperially significant - I suspect he was envisaging the potential we subsequently saw with the Empire boats. He talked Trenchard, then Chief of the Air Staff, and not a flying boat fan, into building it. The military requirement, R.6/28 emerged because the tender had to go out to other companies as well, and Supermarine got a Type 179 contract as a result. but the Sarafand was built for the RAF, not Imperial Airways. The civil requirement was 20/28 Mediterranean Civil Transport, which the Type 179 was redesigned for (i.e. there are two different 179s). That seems to have suffered from requirement creep and was cancelled in 1932.

There seems to be a potential POD at this point. Trenchard resigned as Chief of the Air Staff in late 1928 as he thought he had done all he could in the role. The cabinet took a while to accept and he wasn't officially retired until 1st January, 1930. R.101 crashes in October 1930, leaving the country needing a new Air Minister to replace Lord Thompson, who had been behind the civil side of the requirement. So what happens if Trenchard is offered the job? Trenchard had a reputation for being frugal, he'd paid for the Sarafand, and Imperial Airways needs a long range 15 seater aircraft to cover Mirabella Bay in Crete to Alexandria, because the Italians have closed their ports to Imperial Airlines (they reopened them, but could potentially close them again). The actual aircraft built to cover it is the Short Kent, and construction didn't start until October 1930, with service entry in May. The Sarafand couldn't cover that, it's still being designed at this point, but adapting it would have been trivial, it had the cabin space. The confluence of multiple factors around Shorts, large seaplanes, Imperial Airways and the empire routes is one Trenchard can't miss, because he's personally involved or professionally responsible for all of them. Imperial Airways could be picky about their aircraft requirements, but I don't see that going down well with Trenchard. What this does is give you the potential to bring the Empire Air Mail Scheme and the requirement for the Empire boats as a smaller Sarafand/improved Kent forward from the end of 1934 to the start of 1931 and R.2/33 for the Sunderland along with it (Trenchard will like the frugality of a common design).

I don't think a monoplane Sarafand will fly. The increase in size is risk enough, the Sarafand is basically a scaled up Rangoon, and Shorts haven't built a monoplane since the tiny Cockle in 1924. There's no way Oswald Short would have talked Trenchard into backing a monoplane Sarafand.

WRT the Knuckleduster, I don't think you can bend R.24/31 to fit the Sunderland. R.24/31 was specifically for a two-engined flying boat, not a heavier 3 or 4 engined type. The Knuckleduster got in as an experimental single prototype to demonstrate both a monoplane flying boat and steam-cooled engines. OTOH a conventionally engined Knuckleduster with less-draggy radiators would have been interesting, and if you can bring forward the Empire/Sunderland requirements to 1931 as proposed above then you don't need to replace the Knuckleduster and it can potentially function as a demonstrator for the Empire/Sunderland's planing bottom, much as one of the Scion Seniors was later used.
 
Is that too much of a financial risk or too much of a technical risk? That is will his brand new state of the art factory sink back into the marshes the day after it opens?

Both. He'd need to stabilise the land, and it would still be subject to flooding. They didn't develop the Strood side until the '90s, while the Rochester side was developed for housing at about the same time. In 1927 the Medway flooded to 3.92m above tidal datum at Rochester Bridge, which is only a few hundred metres from the Shorts Esplanade Site. It would be very fresh in Oswald Short's memory. Even today the Esplanade is considered at risk of flooding to a depth of 2.7m.
 
{Delurking}
You have two options. The first is to bring forward the creation of Short Brothers and Harland from 1936, first deliveries from the Belfast factory seem to have been Bristol Bombays in 1937. The complication here is it's an Air Ministry funded development, so you need either a reason for the Ministry to fund it earlier, or for Short's finances to be able to fund both Rochester Airport and Belfast simultaneously (unlikely IMO, and they absolutely need Rochester Airport).
IIRC the production contracts for the Bombay and H.P. Hereford were placed with Short & Harland in 1936 or 1937, but the first production aircraft weren't completed until 1939.

However, I like the idea of building the Belfast factory 2 or 3 years earlier than IOL and making it bigger so that production of the Empire Flying Boat, Stirling and Sunderland is concentrated there, while the factories at Rochester build prototypes and aircraft build in small numbers like the Golden Hind.

That would also fit in with the contemporary Government policy of trying to move important factories to locations where they were less vulnerable to bombing. It would also be in advance of the policy introduced in the rearmament period of building new factories in areas of high unemployment instead of expanding existing ones in areas where the local pool of skilled labour had been exhausted.

{Delurking}
The other option is to have production split over Shorts, Saro, Supermarine and Blackburn, which is how the industry tended to work in those days, but at the cost of making production line construction less financially viable.
That's what I want to avoid.

ITTL I want the state of the art in the early 1930s to be advanced to the point where Sauders Roe could have built 31 A.33 instead of the London, Short Brothers 37 Sunderlands instead of the Singapore Mk III and Supermarine its R.2/33 design instead of the Scapa and Stranraer. But instead of spreading these 99 aircraft among 3 factories I want Shorts to build 105 Sunderlands. As the Sunderland was effectively in production before the Empire Flying Boats, I wanted these to be Hythes or Sandringhams so that they could be built on the same production line as the Sunderland. I wanted 180 to be ordered and completed instead of the 43 E.F.B and the two halves of the Mayo Composite ordered IOTL, but only 42 Empire's and the Mayo Composite were completed. As far as I can tell Shorts built 40 Sunderlands for the RAF before the war broke out and was working on an RAAF order for 19. ITTL I want it to have built 80 up to September 1939 and be working on orders for another 40 for the RAF, RAAF and RCAF, the latter in place of the Supermarine Stranraers built by Canadian Vickers.

That would be a grand total of 405 aircraft built by Short Brothers at Rochester instead of about 140 over the same period.
 
Wrong Westland I'd say. If you're going to pick an airframe to start from, the PV7 to G.4/31 seems like the optimum choice, built as a torpedo carrier and dive-bomber, HP leading edge slats, dive brakes, and the necessary 1100lb warload to carry a torpedo, which is twice the Lysander's, on 200hp less. Serious potential for winning G.4/31, but for the bizzare circumstances that led to the prototype's loss being uninsured and at Westland's liability even though they had already delivered it.
 
I think this is confused over the origin of the Sarafand, which was a military type (with civil potential). Oswald Short thought he could build an aircraft with better performance than the Dornier Do.X at a fraction of the size, and that this would be imperially significant - I suspect he was envisaging the potential we subsequently saw with the Empire boats. He talked Trenchard, then Chief of the Air Staff, and not a flying boat fan, into building it. The military requirement, R.6/28 emerged because the tender had to go out to other companies as well, and Supermarine got a Type 179 contract as a result. but the Sarafand was built for the RAF, not Imperial Airways. The civil requirement was 20/28 Mediterranean Civil Transport, which the Type 179 was redesigned for (i.e. there are two different 179s). That seems to have suffered from requirement creep and was cancelled in 1932.

There seems to be a potential POD at this point. Trenchard resigned as Chief of the Air Staff in late 1928 as he thought he had done all he could in the role. The cabinet took a while to accept and he wasn't officially retired until 1st January, 1930. R.101 crashes in October 1930, leaving the country needing a new Air Minister to replace Lord Thompson, who had been behind the civil side of the requirement. So what happens if Trenchard is offered the job? Trenchard had a reputation for being frugal, he'd paid for the Sarafand, and Imperial Airways needs a long range 15 seater aircraft to cover Mirabella Bay in Crete to Alexandria, because the Italians have closed their ports to Imperial Airlines (they reopened them, but could potentially close them again). The actual aircraft built to cover it is the Short Kent, and construction didn't start until October 1930, with service entry in May. The Sarafand couldn't cover that, it's still being designed at this point, but adapting it would have been trivial, it had the cabin space. The confluence of multiple factors around Shorts, large seaplanes, Imperial Airways and the empire routes is one Trenchard can't miss, because he's personally involved or professionally responsible for all of them. Imperial Airways could be picky about their aircraft requirements, but I don't see that going down well with Trenchard. What this does is give you the potential to bring the Empire Air Mail Scheme and the requirement for the Empire boats as a smaller Sarafand/improved Kent forward from the end of 1934 to the start of 1931 and R.2/33 for the Sunderland along with it (Trenchard will like the frugality of a common design).

I don't think a monoplane Sarafand will fly. The increase in size is risk enough, the Sarafand is basically a scaled up Rangoon, and Shorts haven't built a monoplane since the tiny Cockle in 1924. There's no way Oswald Short would have talked Trenchard into backing a monoplane Sarafand.

WRT the Knuckleduster, I don't think you can bend R.24/31 to fit the Sunderland. R.24/31 was specifically for a two-engined flying boat, not a heavier 3 or 4 engined type. The Knuckleduster got in as an experimental single prototype to demonstrate both a monoplane flying boat and steam-cooled engines. OTOH a conventionally engined Knuckleduster with less-draggy radiators would have been interesting, and if you can bring forward the Empire/Sunderland requirements to 1931 as proposed above then you don't need to replace the Knuckleduster and it can potentially function as a demonstrator for the Empire/Sunderland's planing bottom, much as one of the Scion Seniors was later used.
This is getting what I'm trying to do very out of sync. I was going to do one more post about civil aviation, which would cover the domestic airlines and then I was going to do one post about the changes that I want to make to the structure of the aircraft industry and then I was going to do posts about each of the aircraft manufacturers that would have been most affected by the expansion of the airline industry.

Having said that...

There are two points to me wanting to expand the airline industry to the extent that I have proposed. The first is to expand the aircraft manufacturing industry and the second is to force said industry into making better products than IOTL. There won't be much difference between TTL and OTL in the 1920s, however, by the early 1930s the state of the art is going to be 2 or 3 years ahead of OTL. Therefore the Spec. R.24/31 of TTL was effectively going to be the R.2/33 of OTL. This meant that Saunders Roe would have built the A.33 instead of the London and Supermarine its R.2/33 in place of the Scapa and Stranraer.

I did want to have the Sunderland prototype built in place of the OTL Singapore Mk II because it was the prototype of the Singapore Mk III and I'm having more Sunderlands built in place of the Singapore Mk III, but the Mk II didn't fly until 1930 and I thought that was too early. Similarly I was also thinking of an enlarged Sunderland with 6 engines (effectively a 6-engine Golden Hind) instead of the Sarafand, but as that flew in 1932 I also thought that I was pushing it too far.

Before that I wanted the Singapore Mk I to be a monoplane, effectively a Knuckleduster with conventional engines. A 4-engine version, effectively "Super Knuckleduster" would have been built in place of the Calcutta, Rangoon, Kent and Scylla. However, I thought that was pushing things too far as well.

ITTL Lord Thompson would not have been on the R.101 for two reasons. The first is because the Cabinet accepted Frank Pick's suggestion that Civil Aviation should be under the Board of Trade like merchant shipping and not under the Air Ministry. The other is that there was no Imperial Airship Scheme, because the Government decided to concentrate on airliners instead, so no R.101.
 
To Flesh Out Post 43...
Phase 4 - The Domestic Airlines 1919-39 IOTL


There weren't any British domestic airlines until the early 1930s and according to Davies they were, "small companies formed by individuals, often omnibus operators, who were later taken over by forced out of business by the railways and a London finance company, Whitehall Securities." The next paragraph is worth quoting in full...
The volume of traffic was seldom enough to support this multiplicity of small companies; the British air transport industry owes a great debt to these pioneers. It was natural that there should be competitive interests, and indeed the history of mergers, purchases and failures followed a pattern closely similar to that in the Untied States a few years earlier. The difference between the outcome of the business battles in Britain and the United States was not only the obvious one of size of operations, but far the most important and far-reaching was the general lack of official direction on the British side. When comparative order emerged, the railway sponsored services were half-hearted affairs. On the other hand the continental routes under development by British Airways in the later 1930s had progressed considerably through vigorous promotion and the introduction of modern American and German aircraft. This situation called for the driving spirit of someone like W.F. Brown and the admission that there was room for a few, but certainly not dozens, of small airlines to operate services supplementary to those of Imperial Airways.
I am not going to outline the development of the domestic carriers in the 1930s, but between 1931 and 1939 their combined fleet had grown from nothing to 67 aircraft. They were operated by 3 main groups of airlines (the Whitehall Securities Group, the Railway Group and the Olley Group) plus 7 smaller airlines.

At the end of his section on the British airlines in the 1930s Davies laments...
Thus just as the United Kingdom was at last recognising the need for solid, practical support, and a rational administrative framework for air transport, the War intervened to curtain plans and ambitions. Even domestically, there was cause for disappointment. Following the recommendations of the Maybury Committee, an Air Transport Licensing Authority for domestic routes was set up, and provisional licences were issued on 21st October 1938 to all companies which had been operating during the month ending 13th September of that year, but again because of the War this regulation was never tested. Also on 1st January 1939 a system of Government subsidy for internal routes was begun, at a planned limit of £100,000 in one year-but this pan was not proceeded with.
According to Davies Europe had a total of 31 airlines, with 762 aircraft between them in 1931. There was only one British airline, Imperial Airways, only operated overseas air routes. Imperial Airways had 22 aircraft, only 3% of the total, which. By contrast:
  • Germany had 3 airlines with 177 aircraft or 23% of the airliners in Europe and D.L.H. alone had 145 aircraft or 19% of all the airliners in Europe;
  • France had 5 airlines with 315 aircraft or 41% of all the airliners in Europe and Aeropostale alone had 172 aircraft or 22% of all the airliners in Europe;
  • Italy had 6 airlines with 80 aircraft or 10% of all the airliners in Europe;
  • KLM the sole Dutch airline had 23 aircraft;
  • SABENA the sole Belgian airline had 43 aircraft including the Belgian Congo;
  • The 4 Scandinavian airlines had 20 aircraft between them;
  • LOT the sole Polish airline had 23 aircraft.
According to Davies the airline fleet of Europe had grown to 839 aircraft by 1939 and the number of airlines had declined by one to 30. Of which:
  • There was now only one German airline, D.L.H. operating 220 aircraft or 26% of the total;
  • There were now only 2 French airlines, operating 118 aircraft or 14% of the total. The largest was Air France with 104 aircraft or 12% of all the airliners in Europe;
  • There were now only 2 Italian airlines, operating 129 aircraft or 15% of the total. The largest was Ala Littoral with 113 aircraft or 13% of all the airliners in Europe;
  • KLM was still the sole Dutch airline, but now had 53 aircraft including its West Indies network;
  • SABENA was still the sole Belgian airline, but its fleet had declined slightly to 22 aircraft;
  • There were now 6 Scandinavian airliners with 35 aircraft between them;
  • LOT was still the sole Polish airline with 22 aircraft.
The British airline fleet was now the second largest in Europe with 155 aircraft representing 18% of the total. This included 88 aircraft on the overseas routes operated by Imperial Airways (71) and British Airways Mk 1 (17). The 67 remaining aircraft belonged to the airlines operating the domestic routes. Therefore the number of aircraft operated by the British overseas airlines had quadrupled over 8 years and the number of aircraft operated by Britain's domestic carriers had increased from nil to 67 over the same period.
 
It seems Britain is very well off in terms of transport aircraft, how does this translate into cargo
aircraft or designs that can be used as such?
 
It seems Britain is very well off in terms of transport aircraft, how does this translate into cargo aircraft or designs that can be used as such?
I'm not sure that it will. ITTL the RAF is still going to have a transport force consisting of one communications squadron at home and 2 or 3 bomber-transport squadrons overseas for most of the interwar period.

The best I can give you at the moment is that in the second half of the 1920s either the Post Office or the Civil Aviation Department of the Ministry of Transport wants the air mail delivered to Cape Town, Sydney, Hong Kong and South America faster in TTL than the relevant Government departments of OTL in the contracts to Imperial Airways. This makes the airline issue more advanced specifications for new aircraft than OTL, which is the mechanism for the H.P.42 being a monoplane ITTL rather than a biplane. This aircraft would effectively be a four-engine airliner version of the H.P.51 bomber-transport and H.P.54 Harrow heavy bomber, which was used as a transport after it was retired from Bomber Command.

Then Handley Page was going to submit twin engine versions of the H.P.42 Monoplane to Specs B.19/27 and C.16/28 in place of the Heyford and H.P.43 or put another way bring the Harrow and H.P.51 forward by about 4 years. 200 extra Harrows were going to be built instead of the 124 Heyfords and 14 Fairey Hendons built IOTL plus 82 H.P.51s in place of the Vickers Valentia. In the same fashion as the German Ju52/3m I thought that the extra Harrows would provide a useful pool of advanced trainers for bomber crews, which could also be used as transport aircraft after they became obsolete as bombers. But there would still be no organised home based transport force before World War II started apart from the communications squadron and the King's Flight.

However, as an alternative to building the H.P.51 instead of the Vickers Valentia the RAF could buy about 70 H.P.42 Monoplanes fitted with a side cargo door or even a rear cargo door if it was big enough. But that would not be due to the RAF having a more enlightened policy on transport aircraft, it would be the Government trying to decrease the unit cost of the civil H.P.42 Monoplane by increasing the production run. ITTL I envisage Imperial Airways buying 80 H.P.42 monoplanes instead of 8. IIRC the RAF acquired 82 Valentias, that is 28 new aircraft and 54 conversions of the Victoria. In this variant of TTL the RAF would be forced to buy 82 H.P.42 Monoplanes with cargo doors, which would increase the production run to 162 aircraft plus any export sales.
 
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