Not so much Rolls-Royce as Dr. Stanley Hooker.

Rolls-Royce employed him, not knowing what he could do – and neither did he. It was extremely fortunate that all his previous pure research equipped him to become probably the world’s leading expert on supercharging.

Which begs the question, why didn’t they put an early Olympus into the 188?
Even one of the more powerful reheated Sapphires or Avons seem a better proposition than the Gyron Jnr.

Too big. The Olympus/Gyron size of engine was massively larger than the Junior, relatively speaking.

When they fitted Olympii in a Canberra testbed, it could exceed airframe limitations on one engine at certain altitudes.

Avons probably already in great demand, Sapphires, no idea.

Edit:
Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_188 says they tested with Avons and the AJ.65 (which I thought was the Avon anyway) but chose the Gyron Junior.

The Gyron would have been far too big for the 188. The Junior was less than 50% of the size.

I’m sure I read an article years ago that said with the Avons in the Sperrin being early models, the single Gyron was very nearly as powerful as the other three put together.

Panshanger’s quite possible.
I don’t know about 1952 as a) I hadn’t been there then and b) it’s the year I was born so my aircraft recognition was nothing special, but there was certainly a Gemini based there in around 1955.

IIRC the colour was cream so that could be the same one.

Somebody will probably now tell me they were all cream…

I was reffering to the British aerospace industry not the RAF. If you had properly read my posts you would have realised that and that I was pointing out that one of the flaws was an RAF doctrine which required multiple single role types as opposed to one or two multi-role types.

I’m not ignoring all the posts following this one which I’ve read with great interest but something has occurred to me.

I wonder if the RAF insistence on multiple single-role types was influenced by the FAA, for many years, insisting on a multitude of roles for everything.

This resulted in them receiving a continual succession of, if not complete dogs, aircraft that weren’t particularly good at anything.

I think, from memory, Creaking Door has a good point. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen that mentioned somewhere.

Something else that came to mind is all squadrons were given take-off times. I wonder if the planning was more for horizontal separation rather than vertical. From wikipedia, because it was easier than looking for a book, the Cologne raid lasted 90 minutes. That’s only about 11 aircraft a minute. Very crowded skies yes, but not as much as it might be thought.

Wiki also mentions Gee being used to keep to a given time and height. IIRC, one of the reasons Cologne was chosen for the first 1,000 bomber raid was because it was in range to use Gee.

I don’t know much about bombing aids but I didn’t know Gee could be used for altitude. I’ll have to look it up.

Edit: As far as I can tell, it couldn’t.

It’s a Russian engine that was the nearest they could find to the original.

I think I read somewhere it’s a Russian copy of the original BMW but that may be complete gibberish.