AVRO - Anson

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AVRO Anson ( 19, XIX, ) (Jump to photos)

The Anson was derived from the commercial 6-seat Avro 652 and the militarised version, which first flew on 24 March 1935, was built to Air Ministry Specification 18/35. It was the first RAF monoplane with a retractable undercarriage. The first production run resulted in 174 Anson Mk.I aircraft for service with Coastal Command. No. 48 Squadron RAF was the first to be equipped in March 1936. At the start of World War II, there were 26 RAF squadrons operating the Anson I; 10 with Coastal Command and 16 with Bomber Command. However by this time the Anson was obsolete and in the process of being superseded by the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley and Lockheed Hudson.

Limited numbers of Ansons continued to serve in operational roles such as coastal patrols and air/sea rescue. Early in the war an Anson scored a probable hit on a German U-boat. In June 1940, a flight of three Ansons was attacked by nine Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Remarkably, the Ansons downed two German aircraft without losing any of their own (Gunston 1995). The aircraft\'t true role, however, was to train pilots for flying multi-engine bombers such as the Avro Lancaster. The Anson was also used to train the other members of a bomber\'s air crew, such as navigators, wireless operators, bombardiers and air gunners.

A distinctive feature of the Anson was its landing gear retraction mechanism which required no less than 140 turns of the hand crank by the pilot. To forgo this laborious process, Ansons often flew with the landing gear extended at the expense of 30 mph (50 km/h) of cruise speed (Gunston 1995).

A total of 11,020 Ansons were built by the end of production in 1952, making it the second-most-numerous (after the Vickers Wellington) British multi-engine aircraft of the war (Gunston 1995).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Anson