W
ith the growing realisation
among oficials at the
British War Ministry
of the threat posed by
revolutionary German jet
propelled bombers, in 1941 the Ministry of
Aircraft Production was prevailed upon to
issue a Speciication, E.6/41 for a jet engined
interceptor and the engine to power it. The de
Havilland Aircraft company had already beenapproached to consider such a concept, and
had been given access to the pioneering work
done by Frank Whittle's team and the Gloster
E.28/39. While conventional wisdom at the
time was that two engines would be needed for
a successful aircraft, due primarily to the low
thrust output of those engines then available,
(exempliied by the contemporary Gloster
Meteor) the pace of engine development was
such that as the de Havilland design evolved,the potential for a small, single-engined,
airframe became much more credible.
The design that emerged, given company
designation DH 100, (and an early, soon to
be dropped code name of Spider Crab) was
a twin-boom, straight winged aircraft, the size
of whose fuselage pod was determined by
the 50-inch diameter of the Halford H-1 (later
de Havilland Goblin) centrifugal-low engine.
Construction took advantage of de Havilland'sEl Vampiro Fantasma
We take a look at Revell’s recently released De Havilland Vampire Mk.III, inishing it in a very unusual colour scheme along the way...
KIT BUILD
BUILT AND WRITTEN BY HUW MORGAN30 MODEL AIRPLANE INTERNATIONAL - August 2019EL VAMPIRO.indd 30 08/07/2019 15:19