Blackburn Skua
The Blackburn B-24 Skua was a two-seat carrier fighter and dive bomber built by Blackburn Aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm. Ordered before its prototype flew, it entered service in November 1938 as the Navy's first monoplane and its first dive bomber. On 10 April 1940 its squadrons sank the German cruiser Königsberg at Bergen, the first major warship sunk by air attack. Outclassed as a fighter, it left front-line service in 1941 and ended the war as a trainer and target tug; 192 were built, and no intact example survives.
Why It Mattered
The Skua was the first monoplane to enter service with the Fleet Air Arm, arriving in late 1938 when the Navy's other carrier aircraft were still fabric-covered biplanes. It had been designed to Air Ministry Specification O.27/34 as one aircraft that would serve both as a fighter and as a dive bomber, a pairing John Rickard's history of the type calls not entirely compatible roles. On 10 April 1940 its squadrons sank the German cruiser Königsberg at Bergen, the first major warship sunk by air attack and the first sunk by dive bombers. For the first two years of the war it remained Britain's only naval dive bomber.
Design Notes
The Skua was a low-wing cantilever monoplane of all-metal construction, the Royal Navy's first carrier-borne aircraft of that layout. It brought several firsts to British deck-landing aircraft: metal construction with flaps, a variable-pitch propeller and retractable landing gear. Its wings folded back for stowage below deck, a mechanism that, combined with the retractable gear, added considerable design complexity. The fuselage was divided into watertight compartments beneath the pilot's and gunner's cockpits, to provide buoyancy if the aircraft ditched at sea. Modified Zap flaps in the wing's lower surface steepened the glide and limited speed in a dive, and the 500 lb bomb hung on a swinging crutch that threw it clear of the propeller on release. Armament was four 0.303 in Browning machine guns fixed in the wings, firing forward, and one flexible gun in the rear cockpit. Production aircraft used the 890 hp Bristol Perseus XII sleeve-valve radial; the two prototypes had flown with the Bristol Mercury. The two-seat airframe, strengthened for diving and fitted with naval equipment, was heavy for its power, and the Skua was slower than the German bombers in service in 1939.
Operational History
Blackburn had received an order for 190 aircraft six months before the prototype first flew on 9 February 1937, so the Skua was effectively ordered off the drawing board. It entered service late in 1938 with Nos. 800 and 803 Squadrons aboard HMS Ark Royal, replacing Hawker Nimrods and Ospreys, and 33 were operational when the war began. On 26 September 1939 an 803 Squadron aircraft shot down a Dornier Do 18 flying boat, the first German aircraft brought down by a British fighter of the war. The defining action came on 10 April 1940, when sixteen Skuas of the two squadrons flew from Hatston in Orkney and sank the cruiser Königsberg in Bergen harbour. Test pilot Eric Brown later wrote that it was in the dive that the Skua really came into its own. Losses then mounted: the squadrons suffered heavily over Narvik on 21 April, and in June eight of fifteen aircraft were lost attacking the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Trondheim. Skuas also flew from Kentish shore bases during the Dunkirk evacuation, and in September 1940 dive-bombed the French battleship Richelieu at Dakar. Kept in front-line service for want of an alternative, the type was replaced from August 1941 by the Fairey Fulmar and the Hawker Sea Hurricane. It spent the rest of the war on training and target-towing work, and the last Skua was struck off charge in March 1945.
Afterlife
No intact Skua survives. The wreck of L2940, recovered from a Norwegian lake in 1974, is on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton. A more complete aircraft, the one 803 Squadron's commander John Casson ditched in Orkdalsfjorden after engine failure in 1940, was discovered in 2007 and salvaged; Wikipedia reports that it is to be restored at Norway's aviation museum in Bodø. The Skua's basic design also produced the Blackburn Roc, a very similar aircraft built as a turret fighter with all its guns in a dorsal turret.