It was one of the most influential aircraft of WW2 and enabled Britain to take the fight
to Nazi Germany from 1942 till the end of the war hitting strategic targets and industry
to weaken its war effort in an unrelenting stream of attacks.
The AVRO Lancaster bomber was almost a flying bomb bay able to carry very large bomb loads
the largest non nuclear bombs of war with the 12,000lb tallboy and 22,000lb Grandslam,
not to mention the famous bouncing bomb of the Dam busters.
The Lancaster conducted 156,000 sorties and dropped 618,612 tons of bombs between 1942
and 45 just behind the B-17s 640,000 tons.
Although the Lancaster was a very reliable aircraft, a huge number were lost to enemy
fire and of the 125,000 crew that flew the Lancaster, 55,000 about 44% were killed in
action.
But one of the most successful bombers of the war very nearly didn’t come about if
it wasn’t for its ever-resourceful designer Roy Chadwick, so today we are looking at the
British Lancaster bomber.
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The story of the Lancaster goes back to late 1930s when the RAF was looking for a heavy
bomber.
At the time most were two-engine designs and although they may have been ok when there
was no war they would prove to be a poor match for the German build-up of the Luftwaffe.
We’ll go through some of the aircraft to get an idea of what the RAF had on the run-up
to the war.
Firstly, the twin-engine Armstrong Whitworth whitely which on the first night of the war
dropped 13 tons of propaganda leaflets, as if that was going to scare Hitler into stopping
the war.
A design flaw from the outset and the lack of understanding about flaps by the designer
on large heavy monoplanes meant that the mid-set wings had a high incidence of attack which
made them better for take of and landing but led to a nose-down attitude when cruising
and creating much more drag.
They were later modified and used for glider tugs and parachute transport aircraft.
The Bristol Blenheim was a twin-engine medium bomber which was fast but lightly armed and
could only carry 1000lb or 450kg of bombs and was used as one of the first night bombers,
something that the Lancaster would go on to perfect later.
The Hadley page Hampden was another twin engine bomber which on the second day of the war
made the first daylight RAF attack against German shipping in the north sea because at
the time they were forbidden from bombing the German mainland because factories were
seen as private property by the government, a gentleman’s idea of how aerial campaigns
should be fought and something that was rather quickly dropped along with the poorly armed
Hampden which was moved to mine laying and night-time bombing.
The first true heavy RAF bomber was the four-engine Short Sterling.
Although it entered service in 1941 it was designed in 1936 with insistence by the air
ministry that should have a wingspan of under 100 ft so it could fit the standard RAF hangers
of the time and as such had a limited ceiling height of just 16,500ft.
It also had a divided bomb bay which limited the carrying of bombs over 4000lbs or 1800kg.
In 1936 the British Air Ministry's Specification P.13/36 called for a new bomber to replace
the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, Handley Page Hampden and Vickers Wellington.
This would be a medium bomber for worldwide use which could perform shallow 30-degree
dive bombing and carry heavy bombloads 8,000 lb 3630 kg or two 18 in (457 mm) torpedoes
and have a minimum cruising speed of 275 mph at 15,000 feet.
It also had to feature the provision for catapult-assisted launch for heavy loads on grass runways which
were still common at the time though that was dropped in 1938 as being impractical.
Contracts were offered to AVRO and Hadley page.
AVRO would make what would become the Manchester and Hadley page the Halifax, the Halifax being
a backup to the Manchester.
The Manchester was designed by Roy Chadwick who placed great emphasis on ease of manufacture
and repair.
It had a fuselage made up of longitudinal stringers or longerons throughout covered
with an external aluminium skin.
The wings used a twin-spar construction and 6 self-sealing fuel tanks were contained within
the wings, three in each.
The rear wing was a similar construction and used a twin rudder and fin which also gave
the rear gunner good vision.
The Manchester had a single large bomb bay with multiple racks that could carry a large
variety of bomb loads up to 10,350lbs or 4.6 tons.
For defence, it had three hydraulically powered turrets in the nose, upper mid-fuselage and
rear.
The first Manchester’s had many shortcomings including excessive tail flutter, hydraulic
failures and faulty propeller feathering controls but AVRO were quick to fix them.
The most obvious modification was the third central tail fin & rudder but the biggest
problem was the Rolls Royce Vulture engines and bearing failure which forced the grounding
of all Manchester’s on at least two occasions.
During active missions, more planes were lost due to engine failure than to enemy fire and
to many of the aircrew that flew them, it was a flying disaster.
Both AVRO and Hadley page had chosen the new Rolls Royce vulture engine, which turned out
more of a turkey than a Vulture and one of the very few Rolls Royce engines that weren’t
very good, primarily due to lack of development.
These engines were an advanced design produced before the war which was basically two Rolls
Royce 21-litre Peregrine V12 engines joined and sharing a single crankshaft, this produced
an X24 configuration.
The output was originally meant to be 1750 hp but problems meant it had to be RPM limited
to 1500hp.
However, in service, the new engine was anything but reliable and had problems with big end-bearing
failures and overheating.
The original bearings didn’t use any silver as an economy measure so they weren’t hard
enough which would lead to the collapse of the bearing with the conrod and piston coming
through the side of the engine.
Rolls Royce was confident that they could fix the issues but with the Battle of Britain,
all their efforts were put into supplying and updating the already almost as powerful
and lighter Merlin and the Vulture was eventually dropped.
The two Vulture engines were also underpowered producing at best 1500hp each in order to
try and keep up the reliability, this could turn a single engine failure into a loss of
the entire aircraft because one engine just couldn’t keep it in the air.
In reality, a bomber the size of the Manchester and Halifax needed at least two 2500hp engines.
Both Hadley page and AVRO were given the heads up by rolls Royce that they didn’t have
the resources to develop the Vulture and made the decision to change from two large vultures
to four smaller Merlin’s, a tactic that similar-sized American and Russian bombers
were using which transformed the aircraft.
Realizing the need to either make a whole new bomber or fix the existing one, Chadwick
and his team took the basic frame of the Manchester which they believed was a good plane and redesigned
new longer wings to allow four Merlin engines and the newly unitised “power egg” nacelle.
This “power egg” was an engine and all the ancillary equipment and cowling in one
module that could be quickly changed for maintenance or swapped between different applications
that had been designed to use them.
Power eggs could then be sent for maintenance elsewhere instead of working on them insitu
During its production, there would be only two major revisions, the Lancaster B2 which
would have Bristol Hercules air-cooled radial engines as due to the restricted supply of
merlins for fighters, in the end just 300 B2s were built.
The last major revision was the B3, which used Packard Merlins built in the US but was
effectively the same as the B1 and both were built concurrently at AVRO’s Newton Heath
Factory.
Although it was originally built by the AVRO company, demand outstripped AVRO’s ability
to make enough Lancaster’s so other companies were brought in to help including Armstrong
Whitworth, Austin Motors, Metropolitan-Vickers, Vickers Armstrong and Victory Aircraft of
Canada which built 430 Lancaster’s.
Sections of the planes were built at dispersed locations around the country under the control
of several factories before being assembled at the final factory.
Over time and as special operations arrived, modifications were done to small batches of
aircraft, such as adding airborne radar and upgraded radio for working at sea, engine
upgrades to the two stage supercharged Merlins that the Spitfire used, electronic countermeasures
and bulged bomb bay doors to allow greater bomb loads to name a few.
Other official and unofficial modifications were done at the squadron level, with things
like a 20mm canon or .50 calibre machine guns replacing the ventral turret which was found
to be too slow and restrictive to use.
There were special versions made for a variety of uses but some of the most famous were for
the Tallboy 12,000lb 5.4 ton bomb, the Grandslam 22,000lb or 10 ton bomb and Upkeep, the bouncing
bomb of the dam busters frame.
This is what made the Lancaster so useful fully utilising the long bomb bay with the
average bomb load of 12,000lbs or 5.4 tons but could be pushed to 14,000lbs or 6.3 tons.
For the Grandslam bomb, the bulged bay doors that were used for the Tallboy were removed
and the internal area faired over so the Grandslam sat outside of the aircraft.
They also removed the front and mid-upper gun turrets, H2S radar, rear turret armour
and even the toolbox and crew ladder went to lose weight, the aircraft was also fitted
with uprated engines and a stronger undercarriage.
Because of the extra weight only smooth runways could be used with the most experienced pilots.
In 1944 AVRO upgraded the Lancaster with larger wings, a longer fuselage and two-stage supercharged
engines and this would become the AVRO Lincoln, though it arrived too late for the war it
did become the last piston-engined bomber to be flown by the RAF.
The Lancaster was held in high regard not only by the RAF but by the germans too, Adolf
Galland commander of the Luftwaffe fighters considered the Lancaster to be "the best night
bomber of the war”.
Only 35 Lancasters completed more than 100 successful operations each, and 3,249 out
of 7377 were lost in action.
The last flight of a RAF squadron Lancaster was made on 15th October 1956 when it was
flown to a maintenance unit to be scrapped.
Today there are 17 Lancasters left in museums around the world, two of which are airworthy
and flown at events and airshows in Canada and the UK.
Hopefully, one more which is based at East Kirkby, Lincolnshire and finishing up restoration
will be joining them in the not-too-distant future, a fitting end for a 1936 design that
was considered a failure at the time and went on to play a large part in helping to save
the free world.
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