Night fighter
[2] Things changed on 22 September and 8 October 1914, when the Royal Naval Air Service bombed the production line and hangars of the Zeppelin facilities in Cologne and Düsseldorf.
[9] To provide suitable equipment for Home Defence squadrons in the north of the UK, Avro 504K trainers were converted to night fighters by removing the front cockpit and mounting a Lewis gun on the top wing.
In the meantime, aircraft performance had improved tremendously; compared to their First World War counterparts, modern bombers could fly about twice as fast, at over twice the altitude, with much greater bomb loads.
One of the I-15s configured for night operations, fitted with tracer and explosive .30 rounds, scored a daylight double victory against Bf 109s in the closing stages of the war.
In September 1937, he gave a working demonstration of the concept when a test aircraft was able to detect three Home Fleet capital ships in the North Sea in bad weather.
This naturally led to the use of light bombers as the preferred platform for aircraft interception radars, and in May 1939, the first experimental flight took place, on a Fairey Battle.
[15] The war opened on 1 September 1939, and by this time, the RAF were well advanced with plans to build a radar – then called 'RDF' in Britain – equipped night-fighter fleet.
II) was being fitted experimentally to a small number of Bristol Blenheim aircraft, having been selected for this role as its fuselage was sufficiently roomy to accommodate the additional crew member and radar apparatus;[16] the first prototype system went into service in November 1939, long before the opening of major British operations.
These early systems had significant practical problems, and while work was underway to correct these flaws, by the time the Blitz opened in August 1940, the night fighter fleet was still in its infancy.
One attempt to make up for the small number of working radars was to fit an AI to a Douglas Havoc bomber which also carried a searchlight in its nose.
These Turbinlite aircraft were intended to find the targets and illuminate them with the searchlight, allowing Hurricanes adapted for night flying to shoot them down visually.
By July 1940, this system was well developed as the Kammhuber Line, and proved able to deal with the small raids by isolated bombers the RAF was carrying out at the time.
[28] In 1942, the Germans first started deploying the initial B/C low UHF-band version of the Lichtenstein radar, and in extremely limited numbers, using a 32-dipole element Matratze (mattress) antenna array.
In this case, the fighters, typically Focke-Wulf Fw 190s, were equipped only with a direction finder and landing lights to allow them to return to base at night.
[31] The effective Schräge Musik [N 4] offensive armament fitment was the German name given to installations of upward-firing autocannon mounted in large, twin-engined night fighters by the Luftwaffe and both the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and Imperial Japanese Army Air Service during World War II, with the first victories for the Luftwaffe and IJNAS each occurring in May 1943.
[32] Rather than nighttime raids, the US Army Air Forces were dedicated to daytime bombing over Germany and Axis allies, that statistically were much more effective.
Colonel Winston Kratz, director of night-fighter training in the USAAF, considered the P-61 as adequate in its role, "It was a good night fighter.
[35] The United States Navy (USN) Project Affirm was established at Naval Air Station Quonset Point on 18 April 1942 to develop night fighting equipment and tactics.
[36] Urgency for the night-fighting role increased when Japanese aircraft successfully harassed naval forces on night raids in the Solomon Islands.
The Japanese Navy had long screened new recruits for exceptional night vision, using the best on their ships and aircraft instead of developing new equipment for this role.
Night fighter patrols effectively countered kamikaze attacks timed to arrive during twilight conditions at dawn or dusk.
[37] Even while the war raged, the jet engine so seriously upset aircraft design that the need for dedicated jet-powered night fighters became clear.
[39] Several Me 262 pilots were able to attain a high number of kills in the type such as Oberleutnant Kurt Welter, who claimed a total of 25 Mosquitos downed during nighttime missions.
[40] When the Soviet plans to build an atomic bomb became known in the west in 1948, this project was still long from being ready to produce even a prototype, and in March 1949, they started development of both the North American F-86D Sabre and Lockheed F-94 Starfire as stop-gap measures.
[44] By the time of the Soviet bomb test, the night-fighter design was still strictly a paper project, and the existing Mosquito fleet was generally unable to intercept the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber it was expected to face.
[47] Both the Meteor and Vampire conversions were rapidly followed by a more capable night fighter in the form of the de Havilland Venom, the first model of which having been introduced during 1953.
[49][50] An advanced night-fighter design was eventually introduced to RAF service in 1956 in the form of the Gloster Javelin, a delta wing aircraft capable of performing rapid ascents and attaining an altitude of 45,000 feet.
[60][61] Compared to early air-superiority designs such as the F-100 or F-8, the massive Phantom had enough power from its twin J79 engines to prove adaptable as the preferred platform for fighting agile MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters over the skies of Vietnam,[62][63] as well as replacing the US Air Force Convair F-102 Delta Dagger and Convair F-106 Delta Dart for continental interception duties and the Republic F-105 Thunderchief as a medium fighter-bomber.
[64] The Navy instead developed the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, which on top of the heavy Phoenix, retained the Phantom's versatility and improved agility for dogfighting.
The similar McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet in its CF-18 variant for the RCAF, was ordered with a 0.6 Mcd night-identification light to enhance its night-interception capabilities.
