Prototype to production failures really come down to two things, either the aircraft is a dog and it can’t fettled, or the prevailing conditions have changed so much that the aircraft is no longer suitable for what it was designed for.
So often the latter is the case but the aircraft gets blamed, Blenheim, Battle, Wyvern, and dare I say it Helldiver are all part of that.
Blenheim and Battle were seen as the best aircraft of their class to enter RAF service in the late expansion period, but were thouroughly outclassed when it came to the war. After initail success the same could be levelled at the Stuka, certainly in its primary role.
The Helldiver reflected a determination by Curtiss to follow an outdated idea by the US Navy for a large dive bomber, Vought Vindicator/Chesapeake similar.
Wyvern was dogged by RAF and Navy indecision which stretched out its procurement, only then to be at the mercy of some pretty unreliable powerplants, not sure there was much wrong with the basic concept or airframe.

So far I don’t think we have mentioned many howlers of aircraft design (Swift, Botha, Lerwick aside) where no matter how much work was done on them by research bodies and the services they still were dangerous or otherwise unsuitable for task.
The aforementioned Javelin is a good point, as it did take several marks to get it near to the standard originally specified, and even then the RAF didn’t get its supersonic all weather fighter.

Meanwhile, despite the Supermarine acolyte view, a more balanced reading sees Supermarine as very good and very lucky with Spitfire design and that odd, but remarkably (and unforeseen) ‘stretchable’ and effective wing.

Interesting point that, if you ask someone to name a British aircraft company renowned for its fighters, chances are they would name Supermarine, yet they only produced the one (admittedly outstanding) successful fighter design.
I’m not sure what you mean about Hawker using better stressed skin construction than Supermarine point though James? Supermarine were the first out of the two to use it and both had a good enough quality of construction and understanding of aerodynamics, certainly from a usable service aircraft point of view.
I still say that not withstanding that the Spitfire represents a remarkable prototype to production achievement, the prototype itself was modified to almost spitfire Mk.I standard, in photographs of it in camo it is barely indistinguishable from its earliest form.

Would ‘LANGKR’ be a poorly-written “Langar” then?

Yep, Avro’s facility at Langar was where Shackleton modification (notably Mk.3 ph.III) & upgrades etc were conducted.
I’m sure T/O will be keen to see these switches!

Swift.

That’s an interesting one, it strikes me as one of those aircraft that should have had more changes from prototype to production aircraft.
The two 541s were very similar to the initial production Swifts, and most of the development seems to have been carried out on production and service aircraft, six different major variants in just four years, about 200 aircraft built, with very few seeing proper service.
The Hunter seems to have been developed more at the prototypes stage, though it had its fair share of development problems.

I’m not sure that the Avro Tudor mentioned earlier had a prototype as such, the first one was the same as the others of its type number, with again a whole raft of production variants built in very limited numbers.
Some types such as the Argosy were production aircraft right from the start, with no development prototype as such.

My reading is that prototypes will always be different to production aircraft, almost by necessity.

I get entirely what JDK says above, in a way it makes the Spitfire design even more remarkable that it was at the leading edge of construction and aerodynamic techniques, and yet the basic prototype could be completely reworked by a production designer to be in front-line service just over two years after its first flight is incredible – while the Spitfire I still managed to superficially appear like the prototype.

Turning the question on its head, does anyone know of a prototype that required very few changes before entering major production? Mustang perhaps?

Thanks flat12, that is a section of the whole photograph that I worked from to establish the locations, they should be pretty exact as I have traced over the actual locations.

There appears to have been about eight Blisters at various times, including one which was relocated to the domestic site and used as the station theatre!

Thanks for sharing the great pics, I assume the climate is fairly kind when it comes to corrosion problems etc?
I would love to see a P2V-5 displayed in the UK as a Neptune MR.1!

I’ve been looking into ‘Very Heavy’ for a while, mainly due to the St Mawgan connection.

No where can I find reference to a specific type of very heavy bomber or transport that was percieved in 1943 to requir a special base for it as such. The only type I can find is the B-36, but then I can’t find evidence of UK bases being required for it at that time.

I don’t know about Langford Lodge but the four Very Heavy Bomber stations Sculthorpe, West Raynham, Marham, & Lakenheath were all being completed in 1945 with 6,000ft (later three would have one 9,000 ft runways, due to USAF Jet bombers – but unrelated).
All were in East Anglia, so threat from enemy bombing must have been considered very low, to non existant by then.
St Mawgan had a 9,000 x 300ft runway built in ’43 (and a longer one planned), but there wasn’t a transport aircraft envisaged that required that size, it was required to move many aircraft (16,000 a year, 169 recorded on one day) on long dstance ferrying and delivery flights though.
All these stations had more dispersals (of standard size) than normal and better taxitracks from the runway, coupled with the runway size this lends credence to many aircraft movements being the driving factor of their designed layout, not aircraft size as such.

I do get that designs, such as the B-29 & Windsor, were getting bigger and heavier but not to a degree that required much bigger runways then already being planned and built.
Bigger runways were designed to get more aircraft down in a shorter time, witness the monster wartime diversion runways, 750ft x 9,000ft, at RAF Carnaby, Mantson, and Woodbridge that were designed to land formations of returning diverted bombers in streams and get them of into parking areas as quickly as possible.

Personally I can only assume that the Very Heavy Bomber/Transport idea was a single scheme, but my hunch is it referred to frequency of movements and action than to especially heavy aircraft.

How in the name of sanity did you come up with Whirlwind?!:confused: