BALANCE OF AIR-POWER
By OUR AIR-CORRESPONDENT
A IR-POWER rests on the quantity and the quality of the equipment and personnel of the air-forces engaged, on the training and the experience of the air-crews and ground- crews and on the Air Staffs who steer their strategy. Of all these necessary attributes to the gaining of air-supremacy the greatest is probably that of the quality of the equipment and of the men. We have been fortunate in this respect ever since the war began. The technical superiority of our fighters saved Great Britain from annihilation last summer and autumn. That same technical superiority of the Royal Air Force may lead us to victory during the next two years.
This air-supremacy has not always been ours. Those who remember the "Fokker Scourge" of 1915 will recall the effect that the knowledge of the enemy's advantage had on the flying personnel of the R.F.C. Again, in 1934, when Germany began to build up the Luftwaffe, the R.A.F. was completely outmoded by the newest German equipment. The sleek F.einkel He 170 day-bomber was some too m.p.h. faster than our contemporary Hart bombers and some 50 m.p.h. faster than our standard fighters. The German Ju 52 bombers were much superior to our ancient Virginia and Hinaidi night- bombers, which were still in service after many years. For- tunately German mass-production methods slowed up technical development and we were able to begin this war with a decided advantage in equipment of all sorts.
This technical development appears to move in cycles. First one nation will be ahead and then another. During the last war the see-saw of progress was a much less calculable quantity than it is today. In those days the designer was still groping in the dark, not knowing what he might light upon. Design then was an art, rather than the exact science it is today. The hit-and-miss of artistic endeavour was a factor which could not be predicted. Today the aeroplane designer is an engineer first and foremost and an artist as a secondary consideration_ As a result the exact performance of any new type can be forecast to a nicety, and progress is conditioned rather by the bottle-neck of production than by strokes of genius. The poor showing of German aircraft against our own fighters last summer rests entirely on this cause. The Germans standardised on four types of aeroplane in 1935, when the Luftwaffe was in its early stages. Great factories were laid out to build these types on a scale never approached before. A tremendous output was achieved, but in the effort flexibility was sacrificed. Three of those four types are still in pro- duction today, slightly modified but still the same basic designs. These types, the Messerschmitt Me 109, the Domier Do 17, and the Heinkel He iiiK, are likely to remain in production :or some time to come.
Our own position has been more fortunate. We began to build up the R.A.F. some eighteen months after the German effort began. What we lost in production-output by this delay we gained in the later design of our standard machines. Even SO the period from the conception of the specification of a machine until the time it comes into squadron-service is long and difficult. Take the Hurricane, for instance. The design was first laid out early in 1934. The prototype first flew in November, 1936, and the first squadron of Hurricanes went into service early in 1938, four years after work was started on the type. There are important lessons to be learned from all this. For one of the possible troubles of the present production-drive ja this country is that we may lose the flexibility of the factories for turning over to a new type. This is inevitable, but the Experience of last summer shows more than ever before the vital need for the highest quality of equipment. Production-engineers, whose chief worry is to make as many aeroplanes of a certain type as can be fashioned in the material and time available, are always the enemies of new designs. For this reason production should be divorced from design once a machine is coming out in quantity. Development-factories are needed, where the design-staffs can work out the details of the new aeroplanes free from the worries of the assembly-line. Even with this arrangement the evolution of a new type is not all plain sailing. The success, and indeed the very existence of any new design, is dependent on the aero-engine which powers it. In fact the development of the aeroplane is conditioned more by the development of the internal-combustion motor than by any other factor.
In Great Britain today we have reached about the peak of development with the Rolls-Royce Merlin, the outstanding engine of the world during the past six years. Every type of aeroplane which can be used in war has been designed round the Merlin—from the smallest fighter to the biggest bomber. Further progress must wait on new engines. Fortunately we need not fear on that account—our new aero-motors are with- out any doubt the best in the world. But some anxiety must be felt at the fact that the now obsolescent Merlin has been sent to America to be built when its period of usefulness is fast ending. New engines for the new aeroplanes are required in quantity. The designs for our latest aero-motors should be sent to the U.S.A. for big production.
Since we have been so definitely in the ascendency in the air during the past two years—not in numbers but in the quality of our aeroplanes—we might reasonably expect the see-saw to swing, and Germany to forge ahead for a time. Fortunately that does not appear to be likely. The year and a half of war has been used by our designers to skip a step in the evolution of the military aeroplane. This is partly because the high rate of production demanded of the British aircraft-industry pro- longed the life of some old but efficient types over the period when they would have been replaced if output could have been interrupted freely, and partly because the development work of the new engines has been pushed on to a stage where pro- duction is ahead of schedule.
We are at the end of a clearly marked technical stage in the air. All the types with which we began the war now have new and better understudies which will gradually appear in the squadrons, as new production is skilfully dovetailed into the old. In Germany, on the contrary, although there are a few new types, the chief change is in modifications of the older types—re-engined, re-armed and re-armoured, but in general as far behind our new types as the German aeroplanes of last summer were behind the Hurricanes and Spitfires then. The rigid German system of quantity production has precluded big changes without an impossible drop in output.
As our new types go into service, as our rate of production goes steadily upwards, as the great Empire Training Scheme gets into full flood, so may we legitimately hope to extend our mastery of the air out from England over the continent of Europe until the German Air Force is driven from the sky.
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