Fairey Gannet

Fairey designed the Gannet to a 1945 Admiralty requirement for a carrier aircraft that could both hunt and attack submarines, carrying its own search radar, sonobuoys and torpedoes or depth charges. Its power unit was the Armstrong Siddeley Double Mamba: two Mamba turboprops side by side in the nose, each driving one of a pair of contra-rotating propellers through a shared gearbox. Either half could be shut down in flight and its propeller feathered, so on a long patrol the aircraft could cruise economically on one engine and keep the other in reserve. The prototype first flew on 19 September 1949, and in June 1950 a Gannet became the first turboprop aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier, aboard HMS Illustrious.

The production Gannet AS.1 joined 826 Naval Air Squadron in January 1955. It was a big, deep aircraft for a carrier deck, with three separate cockpits for the pilot and two observers, a search radome that lowered from the rear fuselage, a bomb bay under the wing and a wing that folded twice so that it would fit the carriers’ lifts. The T.2 was a dual-control trainer, and the AS.4 had the more powerful Double Mamba 101. From about 1960 the anti-submarine role passed to helicopters, and the remaining AS.4s were given other work: as COD.4 carrier transports, and as the ECM.6, fitted with electronic countermeasures equipment to jam and deceive the radars of the Fleet and the RAF in training.

The ECM.6s served with 831 Naval Air Squadron, a joint Navy and RAF electronic warfare unit based at Culdrose and later at RAF Watton in Norfolk, until it disbanded in 1966. The last Gannets in service were the AEW.3 airborne early-warning version, a redesigned aircraft with a large radome under the fuselage, which kept radar watch for the Fleet with 849 Naval Air Squadron until HMS Ark Royal was paid off in 1978. Fairey built about 350 Gannets of all marks, and eleven survive in the gazetteer’s museums.