Northrop A-17
A two-seat, single-engine monoplane attack aircraft developed from the Northrop Gamma and built by the Northrop Corporation for the U.S. Army Air Corps, for which it was the standard attack aircraft of the late 1930s. The Air Corps bought 110 fixed-gear A-17s and 129 retractable-gear A-17As, the latter delivered as Douglas took over Northrop and sold export versions as the Douglas Model 8. Declared surplus in 1940, most surviving A-17As passed to Britain and the Commonwealth as the Nomad and trained aircrew in Canada and South Africa, while export Model 8s fought briefly with the Netherlands, Peru and Iraq. A few aircraft survive in museums, among them a Canadian Nomad raised from Lake Muskoka in 2014.
Why It Mattered
In the second half of the 1930s, the Northrop A-17 was the standard attack aircraft of the U.S. Army Air Corps. It was a two-seat, single-engine monoplane, a military development of the commercially successful Northrop Gamma, a low-wing design built for special-purpose and mail-carrying work. History of War's comparison with the Curtiss A-12 Shrike it replaced credits the A-17 with better speed, ceiling, range and bomb load, and notes that it was received with some enthusiasm. Its career also tracks a change of mind in the Air Corps: in 1938 the service decided attack aircraft should be multi-engined, a decision that left the single-engined A-17 surplus, and Canada's air force history calls it essentially obsolete by the time the Second World War erupted.
Design Notes
The A-17 grew out of the Gamma 2F, a Gamma derivative that became the prototype of the production aircraft and began Army tests on 6 October 1934. It used a 750 hp Pratt & Whitney R-1535-11 radial of smaller diameter than the Wright engines of the earlier XA-13, whose bulk had restricted the pilot's view. The prototype's semi-retractable undercarriage gave way on production machines to a fixed gear with partial fairings, and production aircraft also needed dive brakes fitted, one of the changes that held the first delivery back to 23 December 1935. Armament was five .30-inch machine guns, four in the wings and one firing to the rear, with a 1,200 lb bomb load split between an internal fuselage bay and external racks. The A-17A answered the fixed gear's drag with a fully retractable undercarriage and an 825 hp R-1535-13, making its maiden flight on 16 July 1936. By the time the A-17As were delivered, Douglas had taken over the Northrop Corporation, and export versions were sold as the Douglas Model 8, each tailored to its buyer, from Argentina's fixed-gear 8A-2 to Norway's 1,200 hp 8A-5N.
Operational History
Service began with the 3rd Attack Group in February 1936, and the type also equipped the 17th Attack Group at March Field, the 38th Attack Squadron at Langley Field and the 74th Attack Squadron in Panama. Production for the Air Corps ran to 110 A-17s, counting the prototype and 109 production aircraft, and 129 A-17As; the last A-17 was completed on 5 January 1937 and A-17A deliveries ran into September 1938. The fixed-gear aircraft were already passing to training units during 1937, yet the A-17A remained the Air Corps' standard attack aircraft in September 1939. On 20 June 1940 it was declared surplus, and 93 aircraft went back to Douglas towards a sale to France that the fall of France overtook; the British took over the order instead. Renamed the Nomad in British and Commonwealth service, the aircraft spent the war in the flying schools of Canada and South Africa rather than in combat. The export Model 8s did fight: the Netherlands' 8A-3Ns, flown as fighters in a role for which they were unsuited, were mostly destroyed in Luftwaffe attacks on 10 May 1940, as the German invasion began. Peru's 8A-3Ps were used in combat in the Ecuadorian-Peruvian War of July 1941, and twelve of Iraq's fifteen 8A-4s were destroyed in the Anglo-Iraqi War of that year. Norway's 8A-5Ns never reached Norway at all: undelivered when Germany invaded, they went to the Norwegian training camp in Canada, many were later taken into U.S. service as A-33 trainers, and Norway sold its surviving aircraft to Peru in 1943. In American hands the type's last war service was coastal patrol on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal from 14 December 1941, and the final U.S. examples, by then utility aircraft, were retired in 1944.
Afterlife
Argentina's thirty Model 8A-2s outlasted every other front-line fleet, ending as trainers and reconnaissance aircraft with a last flight in 1954, and Peru kept its aircraft in service until 1958. Canada's 32 Nomads were retired when hostilities ended in 1945, after what the RCAF describes as reliable training service averaging roughly 3,000 flying hours per aircraft. Single aircraft mark the type's survival in the United States and Peru: A-17A serial 36-0207 is displayed at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, while Peru preserves 8A-3P FAP-279 at Callao and keeps the remains of FAP-277, crash-landed in 1957, as a monument in the main square of San Sebastián de Sacraca. The most fully documented survivor is Canadian: Nomad 3521, lost in a mid-air collision on 13 December 1940 while searching for another missing aircraft, was found in Lake Muskoka in 2010, its crew's remains were recovered in 2012, and the wreck was raised in October 2014 for the National Air Force Museum of Canada at Trenton.