Rolls-Royce Merlin

Exactly.

And then suddenly there is this deafening, vibrating roar of a thousand horsepower Rolls Royce Merlin engine that just completely drowns out your thoughts.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

A soft-spoken aircraft designer named Jeffrey de Havilland sits across from you and slides a proposal across the desk.

He wants to build a bomber out of wood, no guns, no gunner positions, no turrets, no armor plating, two crew, two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and an airframe built from balsa, sandwiched between birch plywood shaped by cabinet makers and furniture craftsmen in converted barns and workshops across the English countryside.

You tell him, no, I'm tail-dragger.

And this is Radio Hangar.

Remove every pound that isn't lift, thrust, or payload.

Build the airframe out of wood, because wood is light, because the techniques are already established in shops across England.

put a real bomb load in the belly, light that airframe up with two Merlins, do it right and you build a bomber so fast that the fighter sent to shoot it down simply cannot catch it.

A bomber that does not need guns because it is faster than the guns that would chase it, the Air Ministry said no.

He's the chief test pilot for Vickers, known for going where others won't.

The Merlin engine turns over, catches.

The aircraft rolls forward.

What happened next took about eight minutes.

A German pilot diving away from a Spitfire could sometimes escape simply by going fast and rolling hard, because the British pilot literally could not keep up with the roll rate at speed.

That problem was eventually fixed, but it took time and it cost pilots their lives while the engineers worked on it.

The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was the other defining choice.

A V12, producing around 1,000 horsepower initially, it would grow considerably as the war demanded.

They're on stands.

But we've got a Rolls-Royce Merlin that used to be in a Spitfire ferry battle.

at Cheetah 9 which was Avro Anson which were the training planes at Malala and after 42 years we've just finished the restoration of our Avro Anson so we've moved fast we've got the Lynx engine that used to be in Kingsford Smith's aeroplane and then a Rolls-Royce Kestrel that used to be in a Hawker Demon.

So there's going to be a lot of noise and smoke.

What if the bomber was simply too fast to catch? Their answer was a twin-engine aircraft with no defensive armament whatsoever, no gunners, no turrets, nothing to slow it down.

Just two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, a very clean wooden airframe, a crew of two, and the understanding that if you built it right, the enemy would never get a clear shot at it.

They proposed the design formally in 1938.

The Air Ministry said it was impractical.

The Merlin engine sat in nacelles on the leading edge.

The whole aircraft came apart into major assemblies that could be crated, transported, and reassembled forward of the supply lines.

Two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, each one producing somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 horsepower, depending on the mark.

Put those in a light wooden airframe with a clean design, and you get performance that made Luftwaffe pilots file reports their command initially refused to believe.

The air-cooled radial engine was the key to that.

A liquid-cooled engine, like the Rolls-Royce Merlin in the P-51 or the Spitfire, was inherently vulnerable.

Hit a coolant line or puncture the radiator and the engine overheated and seized within minutes.

The pilot bailed out or died.

He flew a North American P-51 Mustang for years on the circuit, and anyone who saw him fly that airplane still talks about it.

He understood the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine the way a musician understands an instrument.

Every vibration told him something.

Every change in sound placed him precisely in the performance envelope.