The Griffon might have been the answer to Hawker’s powerplant prayers. Despite plans for an installation on the Typhoon and Tempest, only briefly did it take flight in one of these illustrious airframes
In ancient myth, the Griffon was a creature combining the head and wings of a bird of prey with the body of a lion. It seems apt, therefore, that the Rolls-Royce engine of that name came close to providing the ‘head’ for an aircraft designed for quite a different engine: Napier’s potent but troublesome H24-layout Sabre.
In a letter in February 2022’s issue of Aeroplane, the Rolls-Royce designer Paul Cooper recalled a mid-1970s conversation with Air Cdre Francis Rodwell ‘Rod’ Banks, the fuel specialist who acted as consultant to Rolls-Royce during the Schneider Trophy campaigns of 1929 and 1931. During the Second World War, Banks worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), leading on aero-engine production and research. Banks told Cooper, “If I could have had my way, we would have put the Griffon in the Typhoon and possibly in the Tempest also. But you [Rolls-Royce] could not possibly cope with that. The production plans for the Sabre were well advanced and we had to make it work.”
Plans for a Griffon-powered Tempest w…
