Northrop P-61B Black Widow

In 1940, as German bombers attacked British cities by night, an American officer in London reported that the RAF badly needed a fighter built from the outset to carry airborne radar, which British scientists were then perfecting. The US Army Air Corps asked Northrop for one, and Jack Northrop’s team drew a big twin-boom aircraft, the size of a medium bomber, with a central nacelle long enough for a pilot, a gunner and a radar operator, two Pratt & Whitney R-2800 radials and room in the nose for the American SCR-720 radar. Its wings carried flaps along almost the whole span, with spoilers doing most of the work of the small ailerons, so that it could slow right down and follow a bomber in a tight turn. The XP-61 first flew at Hawthorne on 26 May 1942.

Production P-61As reached squadrons in the Pacific and Europe in mid-1944, and the first kill came over Saipan in early July, when a Black Widow of the 6th Night Fighter Squadron shot down a Mitsubishi G4M bomber. Armed with four 20 mm cannon in the belly and, on most aircraft, a remotely controlled dorsal turret with four .50 in machine guns, it hunted Japanese and German raiders, intruded over enemy airfields and chased V-1 flying bombs over England. The P-61B, the main production version, had a longer nose and could carry four drop tanks or bombs under the wings, and units in the Pacific flew it until the war’s end.

Of the 706 Black Widows built, about 450 were P-61Bs. A faster, turbocharged P-61C followed too late to fight, and a photographic-reconnaissance version became the F-15 Reporter. Renamed the F-61 in 1948, the Black Widow was replaced by the jet-powered F-82 Twin Mustang and the F-94 Starfire, and the last left US Air Force service in 1950. A handful survive, in the United States and China; none is in a UK museum.