Fairey Aviation
2 types ยท 0 airframes
Pre-1950 Narrative
Narrative coming soon.
Aircraft Types
Fairey Albacore
The Fairey Albacore was a British single-engine biplane torpedo bomber designed and produced by Fairey Aviation for the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. It was designed to replace the Fairey Swordfish, improving on it with an enclosed, heated cabin, a more powerful Bristol Taurus engine and hydraulically actuated flaps, and it served widely in the Mediterranean, at Cape Matapan, over Malta and North Africa, and against the Tirpitz. Fairey built 800 Albacores between 1939 and 1943, but the type was withdrawn from frontline service in 1944, a year before the Swordfish it was meant to succeed, and only one composite example survives, at the Fleet Air Arm Museum.
Fairey Swordfish
The Fairey Swordfish was a British carrier-borne torpedo bomber flown by the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War. A fabric-covered biplane powered by a single radial engine, it looked obsolete when it entered service in 1936, but it crippled the Italian battle fleet at Taranto in 1940, helped to sink the Bismarck in 1941, and spent the rest of the war hunting U-boats over Atlantic convoys. Two Swordfish still fly today with the charity Navy Wings at Yeovilton.