Short Monoplane Flying Boat, Knuckleduster (Britains 1520)
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Short Monoplane Flying Boat, Knuckleduster (Britains 1520) |
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in storage 1937 - 1939 |
A blue and silver gull-winged Short Monoplane Flying Boat Britains Ltd. model number 1520. According to the "Great Book of Britains", this model was manufactured from 1937 to 1939, which seems a little late for a prototype that first flew in 1933 and was retired in 1938.
Although the "Knuckleduster" never made it into proper military service, it served as a stable testbed for technologies later used in the Empire Flying Boat and Sunderland Flying Boat.
Design
This was a big, expensive model with a fourteen-inch wingspan, and very heavy.
The Short R34/21 S.18 "Knuckleduster"
The Short S.18 was one of the most distinctive and memorable flying boat designs of the 1930s, due to its unusual "hunched shoulders" design, reminiscent if the shape of the shoulders of a large seabird.
The "Knuckleduster" never made it into production, and only the prototype was built. However, the shape was so distinctive that publications liked using pictures of it to add a bit of variety to their pages, and the aircraft became reasonably well known through photographs.
External links
- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Knuckleduster Short Knuckleduster (wikipedia.org)
