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Fairey Gannet: The Plucky Story of the Ugliest Attack Jet Ever Built

On the photogenic spectrum of British military planes, at one end sits the de Havilland Hornet, with everything else sitting very much below the Hornet on the totem pole. But at the polar opposite end, on the side of unapologetic ugliness, sits the antithesis of the darling Hornet, the Fairey Gannet. To understand why the Royal Navy decided to field a warbird that could turn Medusa to stone, we need to understand the conditions the British Military suffered at the end of World War II.
Fairey Gannet 15 photos
Photo: Royal Navy Archives
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Let us paint the picture for you. It's September 1945, and Germany has been under control by the joint victorious Allied nations for around four months by this stage. Meanwhile, the British Pacific Fleet in the Far East of Asia is returning to British ports triumphant over Imperial Japan thanks in no small parts to two atomic bombings by the United States and a seemingly impromptu human wave attack by the Soviets in North Japan. All the while, almost all the economy and infrastructure across the British Isles seemed somewhat bleak compared to their American allies.

But while train stations, bus terminals, and city buildings continued the arduous rebuilding process, the Royal Navy still needed to keep its aerial fighting force as contemporary as possible. Though the superiority of German technology strictly in regards to air power is somewhat embellished, it's safe to say that Luftwaffe tech was somewhere in the five-to-ten-year range more advanced than allied aerial technology and only then in regards to experimental aircraft. Among the scattered ex-German engineers poached after the war via Operation Paperclip, these minds were put to great use working for NATO.

In all of this mix, the Royal Navy of late 1945 was keen to stay on the cutting edge of aerospace development and to keep pace with the Americans, Canadians, the West Germans, and, most importantly, the Soviets. Among the mix of rolls to fill in the early-Cold War Royal Navy was a turboprop-powered anti-submarine-warfare (ASW) specialist capable of detecting enemy undersea vessels and hunting them down with an assortment of weapons, including depth charges, guided and unguided bombs, and high-explosive-yield torpedoes.

Under British Air Ministry requirement GR.17.45, King George VI's government ordered two domestic aerospace companies to submit design proposals to satisfy the Royal Navy's request. These two are the Fairey Aviation Company of Hayes, Heaton Chapel, in Southeast England, and Blackburn Aircraft of Brough, the Northeast of England. At the heart of both aircraft sat the British's answer to the next generation of propeller-driven aeronautical engines, the Armstrong Siddeley ASMD.1 Double Mamba.

Fairey Gannet
Photo: Royal Navy Archives
Essentially two Armstrong Siddeley Mamba turboprops welded together with a shared transmission, the approach shared considerable parity with the American attempt at a similar engine, the Allison T40. In the earliest models of the Fairey Gannet and the three examples of the Blackburn B-88, the Double Mamba jetted a healthy 2,950 shaft hp. By the time the upgraded ASMD.8 found its way into the Gannet AEW.3, that figure increased to 3,875 shaft hp. As a stumpy lummox of an airframe with an iconic dopy-looking front grille with two octo-bladed propellers mounted on its front, later production-spec Gannet's gained an iconic weird-looking third canopy for an extra crew member specializing in anti-sub warfare.

In the meantime, the first prototype Gannet first took off from a Fairey-owned runway on September 19th, 1949, almost four years to the date of the end of the Second World War. Doing so almost a full calendar year before Blackburn's B-88 was ready. Soon after, testing of the Gannet's aircraft carrier capability began, featuring the first successful landing of a turboprop-powered naval aircraft on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier aboard the Royal Navy's lead ship, the HMS Illustrious (87). On top of carrier takeoffs and landings, the Royal Navy tested the grit of the Gannet's intricate double-folding wing system designed to take up as little space onboard an aircraft as possible.

Though ostensibly ugly as sin, Royal Navy pilots grew to admire the Gannet's smooth, silky control surfaces and easy-riding flight characteristics afforded by thick, straight wings and dual sets of winglets on either side of the aircraft's elevator control surfaces. In every way that isn't the Gannet's lack of autocannons, this plucky side of British beef was the spitting image of American attack planes like the Douglas AD Skyraider and A2D Skyshark. In fact, it was the Gannet that was selected to replace the Skyraider in Royal Navy service as an airborne early warning and control (AEW) aircraft fitted with beefier ASMD.8-spec Double Mamba engine mentioned above, plus a litany of new avionics and radar equipment to intercept incoming airborne threats like bombers and fighters.

Over the course of its service life with the Royal Navy, the West German Deutsche Marine, the Indonesian Navy, and the Royal Australian Navy, the Gannet was even used as a handy impromptu Carrier onboard delivery (COD) system a-la the American Grumman C-2 Greyhound in a pinch. It's unclear if the Gannet ever saw combat with any of the Naval units which employed them, although artistic depictions of Indonesian Gannets strafing ground targets do exist. The type was removed from Royal Navy service in 1978, roughly four years before the start of the Anglo-Argentine Falklands War.

Fairey Gannet
Photo: Wings of Steel Foundation
In fact, it was lessons learned from flying the Gannet that taught Royal Navy personnel that the path forward for AEW vehicles during the Falklands conflict would be dedicated not to fixed-wing aircraft but helicopters instead. For this reason, British license-built copies of American helicopters like the Sikorsky S-61 Sea King became stalwarts of photographs and video footage of that particular conflict. Proposals to upgrade the AEW-specialized variant of the Gannet to roughly the same specifications as the American Grumman E-2 Hawkeye ultimately never materialized, and the type has since been relegated to museum service.

Today, upwards up two-dozen Fairey Gannets are on display at museums across the globe, from Australia to Germany, of course, the U.K., and even the United States. One even remains in airworthy condition under the ownership of the Wings of Steel Foundation in New Richmond, Wisconsin. And yes, she has a name; it's Janet. Stop snickering, will you!?
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