Fantasy Fleet Air Arm

[tigercat]

If you were the  Sea Lord in charge of the Fleet Air Arm  with money no object and able to buy from any aircraft company in any country how would you equip your carriers and other assorted aircraft carrying ships.:

WW1
interwar
WW2


What aircraft would you stick on your CAM Ships, MAC ships ,Seaplane Carriers . What would be your dive bombers, torpedo bombers etc.

[Daryl J.]

Why, in WW-2, the Bristol Hercules-equipped Sea Maryland III did a brilliant job in the Channel with its rockets, various bomb loads, and with the D-variant, it's gun nose did its fair share to return peace to the land.  Or, sea as it were.

[DarrenP]

would have taken the role of Costal Command as well so would have goten Catalina and Sunderland.
Bought American fighters earlier so would have had Wildcats much earlier

[scooter]

Hmm...would have to talk to Grumman and Northrup about the Tigercat and Black Widow development and purchase.

[Weaver]

The thing you have to do in the interwar period is get your crystal ball gazing right, which the FAA pretty much didn't. The reason they had mostly crap aircraft at the start of WWII wasn't because the British aircraft industry couldn't have produced good ones, it's because the FAA wrote crap specification for them to work to and they just gave the customer what he asked for.

My 20/20 hindsight plan to sort out Bristol engines provides the means to a better end. Basically, they had too many projects on the go to develop any of them quickly enough, so my suggestion would be that they scrap the small-bore Aquila/Taurus line and focus all their energies on:

a) getting the Perseus in service quickly and developing it fully,

b) making the Hercules a full 18-cyl "twin Perseus" from the start, which will probably have enough potential to through WWII without having to go to the long-stoke Centaurus at all.

With decent British radial engines available, you can then design decent naval aircraft around them. I see two generations, the first for early experience and the second for the "heavy lifting" for most of the war:

1st Gen, all with a 1000+ bhp "super Perseus":

Fighter: single-seat Skua with a reduced wingspan.

Dive Bomber: two-seat, re-stressed version of the above, with the ability to carry a 1000lb bomb.

Torpedo/recce: essentially a fixed Albacore with the same engine as above. This may seem odd, but the slow-flying/long endurance of a biplane will come in handy in ASW/shadower roles long after it's superceded in the torpedo role.


2nd Gen, all with a Herc-18 of 1500-2000+ bhp:

Fighter: Bearcat-style lightweight, probably based on Bristol or Boulton-Paul designs.

Dive/Torpedo bomber: designed principally as a dive-bomber, the available engine power should enable it to carry a torpedo if required. It would probably be something like a Fairey Spearfish.


Fighter:

[PR19_Kit]

And would they have solved the oil leak issues on the 'Big Hercules' so they didn't get even worse than those on the Centaurus? 

My Dad's description of a Centaurus included the phrases '...... a Hercules with 4 more cylinders, 20 more litres, 1000 more horsepower and million more oll leaks!' 

[Weaver]

Course they would, 'cos they'd have had longer to work on it with more people....

[gofy]

Seafire 47 in 1942...

[Logan Hartke]

I actually gave this quite a bit of thought a few months ago and here's what I came up with.

Carrier Planes
B5N "Kate"            1937
F2A Buffalo           1939
SBD Dauntless         1940
F4F Wildcat           1940
F5F Skyrocket         1941
TBU Sea Wolf          1942
D4Y Suisei "Judy"     1942
F4U Corsair           1943
B7A Ryusei "Grace"    1943
F6F Hellcat           1943
F7F Tigercat          1945
F8F Bearcat           1945
   
Sea Planes
J2F Duck              1936
PBY Catalina          1936
H6K "Mavis"           1938
Ar 196                1938
PBM Mariner           1940
E13A "Jake"           1941
PBB Sea Ranger        1943
E16A Zuiun "Paul"     1944

Engines
R-1820 Cyclone
R-1830 Twin Wasp
Kinsei (Ha-33)
R-2600 Twin Cyclone
R-2800 Double Wasp
R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone

Armament
MG 15 7.92mm
MG 17 7.92mm
MG 81 7.92mm
MG 81Z 7.92mm
M2 Browning 12.7mm
Berezin UB 12.7mm
Oerlikon FFL 20mm
Berezin B-20 20mm
MK108 30mm

Mind you, this was for a totally unaffiliated country in a scenario that had to allow for Pacific combat.  British naval aircraft are just too short-legged in general compared to their US and Japanese counterparts.  For my lists of land-based aircraft, the UK had a very strong showing in both airframes and engines, but their naval aircraft were really only well-suited to European combat, and even then not as well as foreign types.  The types I chose allowed for greater versatility in both role and deployment.  I tried to stay true to first flight and rough development dates, so some of the above are just interim types.  I also didn't extend it past 1945.  Had I done so, you may have seen the Sea Fury and the Sea Hornet on the list, both fantastic naval fighters that just came too late.

Cheers,

Logan

[Weaver]

A very fair point about intended theatres. The FAA was mostly thinking about North Sea and Mediterranean scenarios in the interwar period, so they developed the doctrine of armoured carriers that dealt with a land-based air attack by striking down their aircraft and fighting it out with AAA rather than "inevitably inferior" naval fighters. The price they paid was limited air groups and small lifts that were hard to enlarge, because the only way to get serious armour on something as big and tall as a carrier was to make the armoured flight deck the upper strength member of the hull, so they couldn't then just cut bigger holes in it willy-nilly.

With the 20/20 hindsight goggles on again, the best 1930s carrier would have an armoured deck, unarmoured hangar sides, side lifts and an angled deck layout (no technical reason it couldn't have been done then). In Tony Williams The Foresight War, his expert from the future advises just that.....   

[royabulgaf]

Did the British have any pre-WWII carrier admirals like Nimitz and Yamamoto?  The split control until IIRC 1937 with the RN providing the carriers and the RAF providing the aircraft and aircrew seems to me like guaranteed career dead end for a naval airpower advocate.  Actually with their North Sea/Med scenario, I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.

[Caveman]

I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.

Bismarck and Taranto...

[PR19_Kit]

I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.

Bismarck and Taranto...

..... and the Atlantic convoys with the escort carriers too. Not to mention the Malta re-supply missions.

[royabulgaf]

There you go, PR19.  Auxiliaries.

[PR19_Kit]

I disagree.

The escort carriers were vital to provide some sort of air support to the convoys across the mid-Atlantic Gap. They didn't need to be large fleet carriers, they just had to carry enough Swordfish to keep the U-Boats heads down, and they did. I don't consider that an 'auxiliary' task.

For sure disabling the Bismark or attacking Taranto weren't 'auxiliary' either.