Folland Gnat- Petter’s lightweight fighter
W.E.W Petter was a brilliant aircraft designer, responsible for some very well-known British aircraft types. When working at Westland he designed the Lysander communication plane and the quite unorthodox Whirlwind twin-engine fighter. After the war he joined English Electric and gained again fame with his design for a twin-jet bomber: the Canberra.
He left English Electric to join the relatively small aircraft manufacturer Folland for another ambitious project: a light-weight fighter with the same performances as the Hawker Hunter, but much smaller and simpler to construct at much lower costs. Designated as the Folland Fo.139 and appropriately named ‘Midge’, this small jetplane made its first flight on 11 August 1954. The Midge was nothing more than a ‘proof-of-concept’ prototype without any armament and with its Armstring Siddeley Viper jet engine of only 744 kg thrust it was definitely underpowered.
It crashed on 6 September 1955 when flown by a Swiss pilot., who was tragically killed. The accident investigation concluded the crash was caused by human error… A further operational development was the slightly larger and heavier Fo.140 ‘Gnat’ with a new Armstrong Siddeley Orpheus engine giving almost double the thrust of the Viper. The Gnat made its first flight on 18 July 1955 with civil Class-B markings G-39-2.
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