AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 13 / 69

Plate 13 of 69 · Second World War · Carrier torpedo bomber

Fairey Swordfish

Swordfish I, painted as W5856, the Blackburn-built 1941 Fairey Swordfish (civil G-BMGC) flown by Navy Wings, formerly the Royal Navy Historic Flight, from RNAS Yeovilton, with its 690 hp Bristol Pegasus IIIM3 radial, painted as ‘4A’ of 820 Naval Air Squadron from HMS Ark Royal in the May 1941 attack on the Bismarck, as it flew from 2015 to 2023: Temperate Sea Scheme of Extra Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey over Sky Grey, yellow-ringed fuselage roundels with black ‘4A’ aft, ‘ROYAL NAVY’ over ‘W5856’, roundels above the upper wing only, a large black ‘4A’ under the upper wing, ‘CITY OF LEEDS’ on the port nose, a black three-blade propeller with yellow tips, a Vickers K on the rear cockpit and a dummy torpedo.

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as W5856, the Blackburn-built 1941 Fairey Swordfish (civil G-BMGC) flown by Navy Wings, formerly the Royal Navy Historic Flight, from RNAS Yeovilton, with its 690 hp Bristol Pegasus IIIM3 radial, painted as ‘4A’ of 820 Naval Air Squadron from HMS Ark Royal in the May 1941 attack on the Bismarck, as it flew from 2015 to 2023: Temperate Sea Scheme of Extra Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey over Sky Grey, yellow-ringed fuselage roundels with black ‘4A’ aft, ‘ROYAL NAVY’ over ‘W5856’, roundels above the upper wing only, a large black ‘4A’ under the upper wing, ‘CITY OF LEEDS’ on the port nose, a black three-blade propeller with yellow tips, a Vickers K on the rear cockpit and a dummy torpedo. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (818 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (); engine, crew and dimensions are for the Swordfish I modelled here.

History

The Swordfish

Fairey built the Swordfish as a private venture, the TSR II, a torpedo, spotter and reconnaissance biplane for the Fleet Air Arm developed from an earlier design that had crashed in 1933. The prototype first flew on 17 April 1934, and the Admiralty ordered it into production as the Swordfish. It was a fabric-covered two-bay biplane of steel and light alloy with a Bristol Pegasus radial, open cockpits for a pilot, an observer and a telegraphist air gunner, and wings that folded back beside the fuselage for stowage aboard ship. It could carry an 18-inch torpedo, a mine or bombs, and could be fitted with floats for catapult work from cruisers and battleships. No. 825 Squadron took the first aircraft in July 1936.

By 1939 it looked obsolete, with a top speed of about 139 mph, but the Swordfish was slow enough to fly from the shortest decks and rugged enough to keep flying in weather that grounded faster aircraft. Its crews called it the Stringbag. On the night of 11–12 November 1940, 21 Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto and disabled three battleships for the loss of two aircraft. In May 1941 Swordfish from HMS Ark Royal hit the Bismarck with a torpedo that jammed its rudders, and the battleship was caught and sunk the next morning. In February 1942 Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde led six Swordfish of 825 Squadron against the German battlecruisers in the Channel Dash; all six were shot down, and Esmonde was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Fairey built 692 Swordfish before production moved to Blackburn at Sherburn-in-Elmet, which built 1,699 more, so the type was sometimes called the Blackfish. The Mk II of 1943 had metal-skinned lower wings to carry rockets, and the Mk III added ASV radar in a radome between the undercarriage legs. Flying from escort carriers and merchant aircraft carriers, Swordfish hunted U-boats over the Atlantic and Arctic convoys, and the last operational squadron disbanded in May 1945. W5856 flies with Navy Wings from Yeovilton, and static examples are held by the Fleet Air Arm Museum, IWM Duxford and the Ulster Aviation Society.

This airframe

Swordfish I W5856 (G-BMGC)

W5856The airframe modelled

W5856 was built by Blackburn at Sherburn-in-Elmet and first flew on 21 October 1941. It was shipped to Gibraltar and flew with the Mediterranean Fleet for about a year, was overhauled by Fairey at Stockport over the winter of 1942–43 and went to Canada in 1944, where it was used for training. After the war it passed through private hands in Ontario, and in 1977 it arrived at Sir William Roberts’s Strathallan Collection in Scotland in crates, badly corroded. British Aerospace bought it in 1990 and restored it to fly; after a test flight at Brough in May 1993 it was presented to the Royal Navy Historic Flight, and in 1996 it was adopted by the City of Leeds, whose name it carries. Corrosion in its wing spars grounded it in 2003, BAE Systems built it new wings, and it returned to flight in 2015, flying with Navy Wings from RNAS Yeovilton since 2019. The model shows the scheme it wore from 2015 until it gained D-Day stripes in 2024, as “4A” of 820 Naval Air Squadron from HMS Ark Royal in the attack on the Bismarck: Extra Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey over Sky Grey, yellow-ringed fuselage roundels with a black “4A” aft of them, “ROYAL NAVY” over “W5856”, roundels above the upper wing only, a large black “4A” under the upper wing, a black three-blade propeller with yellow tips, a Vickers K on the rear cockpit and a dummy torpedo.

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Swordfish in 3 UK collections.

Every airframe and serial All 69 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.