Planes you'd never heard of

A dive bomber with a rear gunner position. Not seen that belly air scoop on another plane however.
 
abaddon said:
Fairey Fulmar???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Fulmar#/media/File:Fairey_Fulmar_Mk_II_from_underside.jpg
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Yep, that looks like it.

Turns out its a Royal Navy aircraft so I would have thought it unlikely that it would have been involved in the Battle of Britain, but I just did a little research and found that 808 Sqn got Fairey Fulmars when it was formed in July 1940. It was one of only two Fleet Air Arm squadrons to take part in the Battle of Britain (the other being 804 Sqn) although neither ran into any German aircraft.
 
it looks a bit like a Fairey Barracuda with the very long glazed top, and what looks like too long for two people only.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Agreed. The Fulmar had a spinner, the Battle did not. The Fulmar also had a shorter engine than the Battle (it was a later, smaller variant of the Battle design).
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Looks a lot like a fulmar, but be aware that History Channel is not the most reliable source there is. It could easily be a clip from somewhere else, and even a post-war replica or reconstruction.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Looks a lot like a fulmar, but be aware that History Channel is not the most reliable source there is. It could easily be a clip from somewhere else, and even a post-war replica or reconstruction.

Hans
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My initial thought was possibly a modified Me108 Taifun. But the tail is wrong and the radiator as well. And it is bigger and narrower than the Me108, which is a side-by-side 4-seater.
 
MRC_Hans said:
I don't get the idea of that number of motors, except if it's to use some cheap standard motor. All else alike, the more motors you need to get a given power, the less efficient it will be.
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Is that phenomenon more related to how the fans interact with air, or to something about the power sources? The picture seems to show electric fans which could all be powered by one or two power sources.

Anyway, the purpose appears to be so you can distribute the engines along lines or curves, where the fan diameter establishes a minimum width in one dimension but not two, instead of being stuck with one or two big things with hard minimum widths in two dimensions. I came up with a similar idea once when trying to imagine how a very slim flat airplane (a smaller new stealth bomber) might be built. The next new bomber was thought by outsiders to be likely to use the same engine as F-35 minus afterburner, just two of them instead of one, but that's a low-bypass engine and it would be nifty for a bomber that's subsonic anyway to have higher bypass, so I thought of each engine having two or three drive fans side by side instead of one of any size, which could pull the same amount of air through as a single high-bypass engine but not need to be so tall...
 
Captain_Swoop said:
How about the De Haviland Hornet, an 'improved' single seat fighter version of the Mosquito, used by the Fleet Air Arm but just too late for WW2 and made quickly obsolete by jet aircraft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Hornet
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Winkle Brown's very favourite aeroplane.

I'm trying to recall the name of the 1920s Russian aeroplane that had its skin made of transparent acetate to make it "stealthy". :confused:

ETA: Eureka! The Kozlov PS: a Yak AIR-4 skinned with a transparent celluloid with opaque parts painted with silvery white paint. At least one actually flew and worked a charm... until the transparent fabric yellowed in the sun and lost its transparency when it got dirty.
 
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MRC_Hans said:
Looks a lot like a fulmar, but be aware that History Channel is not the most reliable source there is. It could easily be a clip from somewhere else, and even a post-war replica or reconstruction.

Hans
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I agree, this is why I asked here.

History Channel often uses stock footage along with their narration. I have seen them use the exact same footage in two different programmes about two different aspects of WWII. One was talking about the German Army Group A breaking through the Ardennes in May 1940, and the other was a programme about the Battle of the Bulge, which also involved the Ardennes, but that was around Christmas/New Year of 1944/45.

The dead giveaway was that footage showed what were clearly Tiger tanks, which means it could not have been from 1940 since the Tiger didn't enter service until 1942. In 1940 in the Ardennes, German Army Group A would have been using Panzers.
 
lomiller said:
The Avro Arrow

Just a shade under MACH 2 in level flight and one of the first fly by wire systems before it was cancelled in 1958. Probably one of the first modern looking planes, most of it's supersonic contemporaries were basically missiles with stubby wings.

https://vmcdn.ca/f/files/sudbury/images/LocalImages/avroarrowsized.jpg;w=630

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Avro_Arrow_rollout.jpg
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Whether or not one finds the stated reasoning given at the time for the abrupt cancellation of the Arrow suspicious (which many do), the simultaneous nixing of the (equally advanced) Orenda Iroquois engine intended for it just doesn't make any sense at all - France was expressing unequivocal interest in using them for the next generation Mirage, which alone could have been an order for several hundred.
 
smartcooky said:
I agree, this is why I asked here.

History Channel often uses stock footage along with their narration....[snip] .
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Yes, I can't count how many times I've seen Focke-Wulf 190s (the same one every time, in fact) being shot down in the "Battle of Britain" or Churchill tanks "abandoned on the beach" at "Dunkirk". :rolleyes:
 
TX50 said:
Looks like a North American P-51 :confused:
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Except for the forward fuselage, wings, and tail sure. I suppose they both have a canopy and an under fuselage radiator so much be exactly the same.
 
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