SUPERMARINE ATTACKER: Without This Curious British Fighter, There Would Have Been No MiG-15 

It's interesting that in 1944/5, designers were perfecting the ideal wing for a piston-engined fighter. Then jets pushed speeds up 200mph almost at a stroke, and compressibility effects made these masterpieces almost immediately obsolete, at least for fighters.

Quill mentions in his book on the Spitfire that the Attacker used Spiteful wings because, after the Spiteful was cancelled, there were many sets of already-built wings waiting for fuselages. The use of the wings dictated the taildragger configuration. Another thing I'd heard was that, when operating off a grass field (there were many in use at the time) the exhaust would dig a furrow in the dirt, and this had to be filled in.

I also liked the "make it Spiteful" requirement. Something out of a Monty Python script: "Now, this jet, it is primarily based on the Spiteful, correct?" "Oh yes sir, it is packed with Spite sir! Brimming with Spite!"

I commend you for highlighting the human element of aviation. Pilots are more than statistics. They are real people that risk (and sometimes sacrifice) their lives in their profession. Thank you for remembering them by name.

British engineers are the most exploratory, almost each british jet has completely different philosophy in its design, i mean from Javelin to Sea vixen to Lighting to Vulcan to Gannet to Buccaneer, every single one is as unique as an aircraft gets...

I remember discussing "going fast " with a pretty smart 8 year old back a bit...i explained that going fast on the ground was a bit different to being in the air..you know ...no support.. we can jest about aircraft development and " how it went" but all of it was ingenious in its own right. All sorts of things came into focus at once.. hypothetical radar, wings, electronics, guns, became achievable...nicely produced ..Thank You

“Colourfully named Joe Smith” love it! :)

Given that the rate of technological advancement during the post war and beyond was so fast I’m surprised the Attacker made it to the prototype stage let alone production, the thing about this aircraft that get me is the fact it was a tail dragger and not tricycle, the design being a throwback to the early aircraft of WWI and WWII and the associated problems of pilot visibility and the structural strength needed for the tail wheel assembly, whereas the tricycle design allowed for greater visibility and the main wheel structure not requiring major modifications to be made for carrier variations. One thing I would like to point out is that during the post war period when the United Kingdom was virtually bankrupt our aviation industry was still able to compete with the United States and the rest of the world in terms of design and innovation, but where we fell down was in the ability to compete with the amount of manufacturing facilities available thus making us far slower to manufacture aircraft than anywhere else, especially in the USA who were rolling in an excess of virtually everything.

My Dad was a mechanic with 705 squadron.... I remember seeing photos of the Attacker and other aircraft He worked on in the Royal Navy! Great Video😊

Great video as always. Any urge to cover the Gloster Javelin?

What an excellent exposition on the Attacker. I made a 1/72 plastic model of one of these when I was a teenager. I always thought they were a goid looking aircraft. If only our designers had adopted swept wings much earlier. Thank you.

No, the prototype Attacker wasn't the first aircraft to take the Nene into the air. That was done by in an YP-80A serial no. 44-83027 (which was written off after a crash on 14/11/1945) followed by testing in Avro Lancastrian VH742 (first flight 14/6/1946).

I still reserve the right to like it, terrible though it may be. It looks like something out of an alternate history novel, with this and Ryan Fireballs and other kludgey transitional designs. I suppose that in itself is an indictment, it really did look and perform like a late WWII design, and would've been much worse if not for the brilliant Nene. I'm all out of superlatives for the quality of these videos, hearty thanks and a job flawlessly done as always.

These videos are the best thing about Friday morning.

I really appreciate how the design for the P80 was ahead of it's time. A fuselage with a good visibility cockpit, single fuselage mounted engine with side mounted intakes. The Me262 had slight wing sweep but done for c of g, about the same angle as a DC3. The Meteor and 262 were machines with engines slung under the wings, an evolutionary dead end. The Vampire had twin booms which was another dead end. The P80 offshoot, the T33 was in service for decades, so that speaks volumes.

Having long had an arguably morbid but nonetheless deep interest in the Attacker, I’ve been awaiting this video for a long time-it was even better than I expected. Thanks!

I've always had a soft spot for the Attacker for some reason, and it was a highlight of my trip to RNAS Yeovilton a few years back. One of the museum staff mentioned that in their restorations and storage hangar, they had a single prototype Attacker with an experimental swept wing. Now, I'd known that Hawker was trying that with the Sea Hawk (P1052), but I'd not heard about Supermarine also trying this - but apparently they did with something called the Type 510, that morphed into the Swift. One of the Type 510s was also preserved apparently, and I would have loved to have seen it. In short, I love this period of early jet design and innovation, especially in the Royal and US Navies. Thanks for the video!

Excellent video, hope to see one about the Sea Hawk too! Including it's rather fabulous role in the Bangladesh Liberation War

Pilots a very dangerous job. Scary even in peacetime. Love this Chanel’s obscure stuff. 😀

Many thanks for your efforts and one more awesome video!

I love these designs dives… as a long time plane enthusiast I love daily discovering planes that my youth library books did not even obliquely refer to . I was aware of the bearcat and Tiger cat and think I had a model miniature of the scimitar…. But this has opened a whole new world

A great article, well explained and illustrated. It'd be interesting to see your work on the Martin MB5 and MB6 around the same time.

Excellent loved this one! but then again I feel this way about all of your videos! 😊

I see today's thumbnail is the box art from the old Novo (former FROG kit), 1/72 plastic scale kit, of the Supermarine Attacker. Thanks for sharing!

This is fascinating, as always. Thanks.

Another GREAT video 😍

Worked with these on a carrier (EAGLE) in the 1950s (early 50s)..Usual rubbish given to the Fleet Air Arm. It was a swine to get the taill wheel over the arrester wires and we made a portable steel plate fixing to allow the wheel to roll over the wire.. Rumour had it that if you were a quite tall pilot your kneecaps would be badly damaged if you ejected as they may well hit the windscreen top edge combing.

Just came across this channel. Nice video.

Uh, that Attacker/Fury specification comparison chart at about 12:55 - the numbers for each aircraft are switched the wrong way around!

Weird, I just received the Trumpeter 1/48 Attacker F.1 in the mail Monday. Great video.

Interesting to watch thank you for the video.

ty for covering this plane

1:44 The Seafire 47 was the naval equivalent of the Spitfire 21, which had a semi-elliptical wing which also differed from that on Merlin-powered marks. Late model Griffon Spitfires took on the large Spiteful tail in order to retain control authority in yaw, but this is more a matter of taking something that was already there. 1:58 The flying qualities of the Spiteful/Seafang were not great (as you point out later in the video) - in particular they had very nasty stall characteristics, and the more the wing was changed to try to fix this, the more it compromised the high-speed performance. The Hawker fighter was simply better, as was the existing Seafire. Among other disappointments, the critical Mach number of the Spiteful wing was actually _worse_ than that of the Spitfire, but this was disguised by the drag being lower below this. Supermarine's performance estimates were grossly over-optimistic. 2:07 Supermarine losing their way is a fair criticism. Joseph Smith, who took over after R.J. Mitchell's death, did an outstanding job of incremental improvement on the Spitfire, but the quantum leaps that made it into service in any realistic numbers were all in terms of the engine fit. 2:37 The Spiteful F. Mk16 that did 494mph was a one-off with a two-stage, three-speed Griffon that kept on blowing up. Most Spitefuls topped out at around 485mph, but while this was 35mph faster than any Spitfire, it still couldn't compete with jets. 3:42 Without _Clement Attlee giving the Nene to the Soviets_ there would have been no MiG-15. The Russians' design teams were capable of producing an engine like this, but what really benefited them was a study of the Nene's metallurgy. 6:24 There was discussion of a nosewheel, but the taildragger layout was favoured in order to get the Spiteful wing onto a Nene-powered fuselage ASAP. The same goes for the guns, as you say. Everything after this just shows how far Supermarine had fallen. What would have happened had Mitchell not died of bowel cancer (at a terrifyingly young age) is one of the great what-ifs, especially since Sydney Camm lived to see the beginning of Harrier design.

Interesting video, well done.

Just calling to your attention what PatrickChase5624 already mentioned; the Attacker and FJ-1 Fury data being switched. The switched range #'s were freaking me out. Awesome video and awesome series. Thanks!!

Never heard of this aircraft before, thanks for the story. I do take one exception on your comment about the FJ1 Fury. The Fury was designed as a pure fighter, no plans for it to be used in the attack role. The design would lead to the swept wing FJ2/3/4 and the USAFs F86 Saber.

Sabre was kept in Europe and not sent to Korea. They sent the F80, initially. The best was kept for the most important theatre. Perhaps that is why the Sea Fury was sent and the Attacker was kept in Europe.

The statistics for the attacker vs the Fury are swapped at 13:04. For example you have the Attacker with a ceiling of 32000 ft vs the Fury at 45,000, whereas the opposite is true.

Very good video.👍

Fascinating!!!

Interesting! Thanks! I was a bit surprised the Attacker served into the mid-'50s. I thought it had as short a service life as the Phantom and Fury.

Interesting i had a soviet plastic model of an attacker but as i kid could never find anything about it in aviation books ...and don't speak Russian. Almost 40 years later i stumbled on this ...great stuff .

Thank you Sir.

Wouldn’t wing-mounted cannons help avoid gas-ingestion engine stalls? That seems to have been a frequent problem with single engine fighters with nose-mounted cannons.

Nice.

You've turned into one of the best aviation channels on YT! Please consider mirroring your content on Nebula. I'd hate to lose access if and when YT jumps the shark!

In reference to the Spiteful; Saab had a paper project before focus shifted to jet propulsion, a shift that would eventually lead to the J29 Tunnan. This paper project for a J27 was very similar to the Spiteful. Laminat flow, Griffon (Gripen) with counter rotating propp...

The Mig 15 was issued from german projects. Its engine was a copy of the RR Nene, used everywhere except in GB.

As unimpressive an aircraft as it looked. Thanks for the comparison with the USN FJ-1.

Is there any chance of a video being made about the Fairey Gannet?

From your pronunciation of Nene you are in the Downstream of Oundle camp. Hopeful the Upstream of Oundle camp won't get too upset.

By August 1951, the Attackers nearest design contemporaries had both been out of service for over a year. For the USN the F9F and F2H were frontline fighters on widespread service. That year, the F3D entered squadron service. By 1952, when the attacker went to sea finally, the swept wing F9F, the cougar, was entering squadron service. It's interesting that the Attacker was so far behind the curve. In fairness, it also shows just how fast things were developing at the time.

1:43 I've searched but never found a good answer. Why is there a little window aft and just below the canopy? I've seen this on several British planes. I've always wondered if you could fit someone in there if you had to.

"precision manufaturing" and british postwar industry are basically anathema :P

nice

At about 02:55 in this video, it LOOKS like: _How to easily melt your horizontal & vertical stabilizers._ On the upside, it looks like deicing those same services would have been no problem whatsoever.

I built a Novo 1/72 Attacker some 40 years ago. A nice model. The Attacker would have looked better with a tricycle undercariage like the Seahawk which it resembles.

I like your vids a lot but can you, please, add metric measures, at least in the captions?

It makes sense why the attacker fb was handed the wing mounted guns when understanding a previous design established the wing for performance. It is still annoying that they are wing mounted for the gun convergence, but that's the war thunder player speaking 🙂

The Attacker has something of the elongated fuselage of the Hawker Hunter.

Supermarine sure had a rotten run after the Spitfire with lemon fighters such as the Attacker , Swift and Scimitar

Nice one. Can we get a Heaker Sea Hawk video? I guess: Pretty, effective, but also 5 yrs too late for greatness.

19:49 Isn’t that a Westland Wyvern on the flight deck?

It is odd seeing that obvious piston aircraft wing stuck awkwardly to a jet fuselage. The advantages of a tail-dragger jet never occurred to me until now, so thank you for that. We are used to seeing the early Me 262 with it's tailwheel configuration and subsequent upgrade to the tricycle undercarriage, so I assumed the tailwheel was detrimental to jet performance. Shorter runways would have suited the Germans in the final year of the war, so the benefits of a tailwheel could have stayed if Messerschmitt had been able to move the cockpit further forward.

Noob question: What’s the difference in performance between a three blade propeller and a five blade effort? For instance do less powerful engines require more blades?

Of the Allies, it was only the Soviets who learned from the Germans and their success in aeronautics something they gained steam 5 years after WW2 when the Korean War began. The British, in a fit of naivety, gave away the piece of the puzzle the Russians lacked, a working good jet engine. The rest is history….

If this video was done by Dark Docs, it would be all the positives and you would never hear about the negatives.

Starting at about 20:32 in this video: Does anyone know what type of helicopter that is 'hovering' over to the left? {I presume it is a late 1940s/early 1950s Sikorsky.}

It's almost like British post war designers picked up the baton from French interwar designers

They should have known from the start a tail wheel on a jet aircraft wont work on the long run, even the germans found that out in the prototype 262

Another good one -- thanks. It's easy to be critical of these first gen jets, but NONE of them were very good. Still, you had to start *somewhere*.

What about the SeaMe-later?

12:59 i think you should swap both jets to the other side....

The Spiteful wasn't a failure, it was outdated by the pace of aviation development.

This message is for RU-vid Five ads in a 22 minute video will only prompt me and my friends to boycott the products and services the ads represent Throwing these interruptions into our video without any plan towards putting them in at the end of a sentence, shows that RU-vid expects you to go premium just to stop their obnoxious ads Anywhere else this would be considered extortion have a great day RU-vid, but you won’t ever get a penny from me

8:20 the bird looks like a plastic model assembled by a 5-year old.

I think the design is beautiful.

As seen in WarThunder [crippled]

A class of combat aircraft should never kill more of your pilots than the enemy

How was the French aircraft industry able to emerge so quickly and successfully after the war during this same time span? Their aircraft industry was obliterated and yet advanced designs were evident comparable to British designs that enjoyed a greater manufacturing impetus.

2:58 What is THAT?

It's interesting that when you compare the FJ-1 Fury and the Attacker and put up the stats (excluding armament where I concede the Attacker is superior) the numbers show the Fury is better, far better in every performance stat than the Attacker, except in range. There the Fury was seriously deficient. Fine, find a way to carry more gas or use a more fuel efficient powerplant. The rest of the comparison isn't even close!

You should make a video on HAL HF-24 Marut, The first jet Fighter made in India, designed by legendary German designer Dr. Kurt Tank, designer of FW-190.

The german Bundesmarine also used the type in their early days

During WWII, my grandmother installed the wings on spitfire fighters.

The type of landing gear fitted to an airplane does not determine its nose attitude on approach. That is a function of the angle of incidence at which the wing is set. This also has nothing to do with 'aerodynamic braking' on approach, which is a term normally reserved for the post-touchdown maneuver used in lieu of wheel braking. What must be meant in the video is that the airplane was draggy enough on approach (probably due to those flaps) to not require additional drag or thrust attenuation devices to maintain safe engine rpm. Another thing, having taildragger landing gear does not shorten the takeoff run unless the airplane isn't able to rotate to the takeoff attitude when necessary. If a plane can't rotate for takeoff (for example due to bicycle landing gear) then you need to have the wing set at an angle of incidence to allow liftoff without rotation. Having nose gear does not limit the pitch attitude an airplane can achieve on the ground. With conventional gear keeping the tail down for the entire takeoff run can actually inhibit acceleration, as compared to raising the tail during acceleration and then rotating when near takeoff speed.

EVERY working wing is a laminar floating wing !!

Spit? Greater Range? Well if you insist..

It sounds like the Attacker was built by BL. 😂

Pretty forgotten aircraft so very interesting video thanks. I was always put off by how just ugly it was😉- (where as the sea hawk I always was one of the smartest looking straight wing jets ). Unfortunately just yet another case where a Britain , exhausted by war/post- war , gave up its genuine lead & advantage by just not having the money to speed up the necessary development. The “ no mig 15” bit about the Nene...😮goodness that’s so triggering in a reminder of one of the stupidest , political decisions ever made by a UK gov in 20 century (& that’s saying something 😏)

Increasing the incidence?

*_"Supermarine Spiteful"_* Choosing that name sounds about as optimistic as naming another aircraft _"Icarus."_ 🙄

It simply looks wrong.

They would have been better off by just buying some F2H Banshees

Sorry. We see the attacker turned out to be a dead end ; straight wing obsolete.

The Attacker highlights the reason why the FAA should have built licensed versions of US Navy Jet aircraft. The British aviation industry could produce competitive land based aircraft but they never really could develop competitive carrier aircraft. The Sea Fury was the best they did and it was obsolescent when introduced. It was not competive with -4 and -5 Corsairs in actual use since the Sea Fury could only carry half the payload of the -4 in ground attack missions. That is pathetic given that Corsair was a pre-war design.

🇦🇺 Not a good looking aircraft 🫣

I feel the British often over bloat their importance in history

"Depthness"??? Not a word. "Greater depth" is English. Lack of proofing shows bad production values.

Wow an absolute badass that test pilot was when the wing folded up and he decided to not eject and try and land it instead during a time when test pilots were getting killed far to frequently when jets started entering the scene .. balls of steel from the greatest generation 🫡