by Phil Delnon
The historical perspective is a distorting lens: mythology obscures realities. So for example the legendary Me-109 had a very cramped cockpit; the Spitfire could be a nasty little beast in the hands of the inexperienced, and the Zero had a lamentable lack of armour-plating behind its pilot.
So the first version of the P8 had a fixed propeller and a few difficulties in handling. Penrose wasn't happy when Westland sent it to be evaluated at Martlesham, for he knew that the RAF pilots would discover its limitations.
They did; but war was just over the horizon, and a production order was placed. Westland had been sub-contracted to produce 178 Hawker Hector biplanes. Now they had work of their own, turning out the P8 under its new name: Lysander.
The Lysander had problems - one of which persisted into the production versions and caused several crashes - but was otherwise a very forgiving aircraft, as Penrose himself discovered when part of the windshield caved in, breaking his nose and cutting his face. For a short time he was not flying the aircraft at all: it flew itself.
Financial security opened the way for Westland's next new design: a twin-engined single-seat monoplane fighter with four nose-mounted cannon: the P9. The twin-engined fighter was a holy grail of the day: almost everybody was trying to reach it, and nobody really succeeded. The idea was to have high speed, long range, and nose-mounted guns for optimum firepower. The Germans tried with the Me-110 Zerstörer, an ungainly beast which could hardly defend itself; the American P 38 Lightning was little better, though some pilots achieved good results with it in the Pacific. The best of the bunch was probably the rather later de Havilland Mosquito, which had the one advantage of phenomenal speed.
The Hawker Hectors were obsolete before they were built; the Lysanders were a different matter. And now the P9 was ready for flight-testing. War was coming, and the pressure was on: Westland was bought up by the John Brown shipyard, and the parent Petter Company was bought out by Brush Electrical and moved to Loughborough. The vacant site was to be used for an expanded Westland works.
And now, at the end of the Golden Age of Aviation, Penrose flew the prototype Spitfire. It was a quantum leap, as he discovered in two ways.
The first was the temptation offered by the sight of a nearby Gloster Gladiator -at that time the RAF's latest fighter biplane- 1,000 ft above him: Penrose pulled back on the stick, had a brief blackout, and found himself 2,000ft above it. That was all the proof he needed. Over Malta and in a few other engagements, a handful of brave biplane pilots were yet to write their own defiant footnotes, but with the advent of more powerful engines such as the Merlin, the contest between biplane and monoplane was over.
The second leap came when he throttled back to return home and a very loud klaxon reminded him that the undercarriage was still up...
Penrose had two reservations over the Spitfire: having to change hands to operate the undercarriage, and the blind spot imposed by that huge Merlin-filled nose. All the same, he was an enthusiastic convert.
Penrose also flew the Fairey Battle and the Bristol Blenheim, two bombers with very different futures, and was invited as passenger on a Blackburn Shark for take-off and landing on an aircraft-carrier.
The P9 had been named the Whirlwind, which was quite appropriate as it was proving a bit of a handful, with an engine failure which had Penrose landing single-engined on an RAF satellite airfield officially rated too small for it. RAF pilots at Farnborough endorsed Penrose's criticisms of the plane, but by now the international situation was so grim that 200 were ordered.
Presumably the Air Ministry had decided that the most serious defects would be fixed before the production versions went into service, and that any modern combat aircraft were preferable to no modern combat aircraft.
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