Bristol F.2b Fighter

Frank Barnwell drew the Bristol Fighter at Filton in 1916 as a two-seat reconnaissance machine built around the new Rolls-Royce Falcon, and the prototype flew on 9 September 1916. Its odd arrangement was the point: the fuselage was slung midway between the wings, clear of the upper wing and carried on short struts above the lower one, so the pilot could see over the nose and the observer could swing his Lewis gun on a Scarff ring through most of the sky. A Vickers gun fired forward through the propeller. The F.2A with the 190 hp Falcon I came first, and the F.2B with the 275 hp Falcon III, a better view forward and more fuel became the standard aircraft.

Its debut could hardly have gone worse. On 5 April 1917, during ‘Bloody April’, six F.2As of No. 48 Squadron led by William Leefe Robinson VC met Manfred von Richthofen’s Jasta 11 and lost four of them, Robinson among the prisoners. The crews had flown it as two-seaters were then flown, in a defensive formation relying on the rear gun. Once pilots began to fly it like a single-seat scout, attacking with the front gun and trusting the observer to guard the tail, the ‘Brisfit’ became one of the best fighters of the war; Andrew McKeever of No. 11 Squadron and his observers were credited with 31 victories in one. Bristol and its sub-contractors built 5,329.

The Fighter outlived the war by fourteen years. The Royal Air Force kept it as its standard army co-operation aircraft through the 1920s, flying on the North-West Frontier of India, in Iraq, Ireland and Germany, and at Constantinople during the Chanak crisis of 1922–23, with strengthened Mk II, III and IV versions following. The last RAF examples left India in 1932, and New Zealand’s flew on until 1938. Only a handful survive: Shuttleworth’s D8096 flies, and the RAF Museum and IWM Duxford each keep a genuine one.