Birth of a new British biplane interceptor — that the RAF didn’t want
The story of how Sir Charles Richard Fairey shook up the British aviation establishment with his revolutionary Fox light bomber has passed into lore. Less well-known is the parallel tale of the Firefly fighter, and how close, after years of trying, Fairey came to displacing Hawker as creator of the RAF’s first true interceptor.
In the early 1920s, when drawing up plans for the defence of the UK from air attack, the RAF began to consider the possibility of a fighter that could catch and engage bombers on their way to the target. Th e conventional tactic for defending against bombing attack at this time was ‘zone defence’ — fighters allocated to a zone with likely targets, aiming to be in the air to meet them as they arrived. Th e ‘interception fighter’ was mooted as a different and complementary approach, in which aircraft stationed ahead of any likely targets would respond to early warnings of approaching bombers detected in the coastal ‘sound mirror’ system. They would rapidly take off , climb to meet the bombers and engage them before they reached the target zone. Th is favoured speed and climb over characteristics such as loiter time and manoeuvrability.
