Westland Whirlwind Mk. I, low altitude fighter / fighter bomber / intruder
RAF 137 Sq, Charmy Down, UK, 1942
Piloted by E.L. Musgrave from Australia
(Airfix 02064-0, 1:72)
Nice work for this small scale. I wonder why this aircraft wasn’t more successful in the war?
Nice little plane! It looks like you had fun building that kit. It’s a nice display piece for sure and I can see how much attention you put into it. Very nice. Keep modelling!
Thats a great model of a good looking plane. To Nathans question, looking over the specifications; it was underpowered. Only 850 hp per engine, about half what a Beaufighter had.
A lot of those pre war designs were outclassed pretty quickly.
The engine had insufficient “oomph,” ran out of steam at around 20,000’, and Rolls-Royce felt that it wasn’t worth the effort to improve it. Westland couldn’t build more than 2 per week, which was nowhere near enough, and Dowding said that the single-engine Hurricane IIC could do an equal job of ground attack.
That’s correct. It was a bad choice to pick the Rolls Royce Peregrine engines for the Whirlwind: underpowered and a lot of technical troubles. RR was ordered to focus on the production of the Merlin engines.