TORPEDO BOMBERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 February 1935, Page 3

TORPEDO BOMBERS

DEFENCE IN THE AIR. Four Vildebeeste torpedo-bombers will shortly be shipped from England by Vickers, Ltd., to New Zealand. The ’planes will be the first shipment of a dozen which have been ordered, and their arrival will mark an important step in the strengthening of New Zealand’s air force. The old immunities of seas and desert stretches have lost their power to check an attacker. The strategy of the future may be worked out less in terms of days’ marches, and more in terms of flying range and bombing. That is why defence forces of every country in the world to-day are revising their strategic plans in terms of the aeroplane. As they prepare to meet speed with speed, they have before them the memory of the occasion when General Balbo and his squadron of Italian flying boats flew across France. A group of what the French called “pursuit” machines went up to escort the visitors. These small pursuit machines could not even keep pace with the big Italian boats. The French ’planes were not old, but even since they had been built the designers had pushed the speed ratios up an inexorable notch or two. I

So it goes on, and so an ever widening radius of vulnerability forces the nations to increase their precautions. In the designs of several nations, speed and size have already been reconciled in aircraft. During the war, the bombing ’planes were slow and clumsy, vulnerable to attack by small pursuit machines. The impetus of commercial aviation has changed that. The German Heinkel 70 model, which recently flew from Berlin to Seville in eight hours, could, if it were fitted with a war-type engine, take a bombload of 11001 b a distance of 800 miles at a speed of 240 miles an hour. Fokker’s biggest class of machine, which is in use on the Amsterdam-Batavia run, carries 32 passengers and a crew. Converted to war use. it could take two tons of bombs and travel at nearly 200 miles an hour. The American-planned Douglas 14-seater, of the type flown by Parmentier and Moll in the Air Race, is believed to hold possibilities as a bomber.

AUSTRALIA’S PLANS. In Australia, attention has turned north wards to Darwin, whore at Fanny Bay an area of 875 acres is being prepared as a great airport. For defence purposes, this is intended for emergency use, and none of the new Demon squadrons will be stationed there. Attention is being given, on the other hand, to the vulnerability of Sydney, Newcastle and Perth. Australia’s measures, which are entirely defensive in scope, might play their part not only against hostile aircraft. but against seaborne enemies. The havoc that defending squadrons could wreak on battleships and convoys of transports has been shown in manoeuvres overseas, where direct hits to a total of' 80 per cent, have been registered with torpedoes and bombs dropped from aeroplanes upon vessels at sea.

In Britain, the Air Ministry is to supply the Royal Air Force with a new long-range bomber, equipped with a rotary gun-turret not unlike a miniture battleship. This machine is>the Overstrand biplane, and it has been designed to allow the accurate firing

of its gun at a speed of 200 m.p.h. For a similar purpose the outlandish Pterodactyl models are --beirig evolved —tailless Fighter aeroplanes, in which there 1” said to be no “blind spot" from which the".machine can* be attacked in the air without the attacker coming into range of its machine guns. - • ■ > In the general war strength of Russia’s Air Force, which contains over 1500 effective machines, all-steel construction is exploiting'the new reconciliation between weight and speed. Other countries are adopting the same

idea, and France has recently completed a’> 16-ton, four-engined, all-steel monoplane which has a top speed of just on 200 miles an hour.