Miles M.20 wartime emergency fighter prototype.

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hotdogmurderer69420@reddit

Its almost like a p40 and a bubble canopy typhoon were smashed together, i love it

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Busy_Outlandishness5@reddit

From what I've read, test pilots considered it to be the equal of the P-40s that the British were receiving.

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Basically just a hastily-developed wooden airframe bolted to the quick-change, modular Merlin installations that would later be used on the Avro Lancaster. Fixed undercarriage saved on the resources and cost to make it retractable.

Despite this, it seems it was not a bad plane - Eric Brown flew one of the prototypes and thought well of it.

It seems this thing is what the British would have built more of if there'd been a different time-line and they had faced the 1945-type, last-ditch desperation-phase the Germans were ultimately to go through.

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FranciscoDisco73@reddit

Its top speed was between the Hurricane and the Spitfire. It would have been more effective than the Defiant.

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Ornery_Year_9870@reddit

Miles had a lot of experience making small, fast airplanes.

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TacTurtle@reddit

If it had flown a year earlier and was ready for mass production in Sept 1939 instead of 1941-1942, maybe.

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BhimaBhiswaniBirru@reddit

Question for the group. Only asking it now because the picture clearly shows something I have noticed on lots of aircraft. Especially aircraft of this era and in naval fighters. Notice how the elevator is well behind the rudder/vertical stabilizer. Why is that?

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YalsonKSA@reddit

Its proposed armament was 12 (twelve) .303 Brownings. Which is a lot.

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JakeGrey@reddit

20mm cannon were more complicated to manufacture and thus in quite short supply in the early days of the war, so I suppose they were hoping to make up for the limitations of .303 with sheer volume of fire.

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YalsonKSA@reddit

I have no doubt you are right. I believe there was a Spitfire variant that was armed with 12 .303s as well, after experience earlier in the war (but before suitable numbers and types of 20mm cannon were available) showed that the .303 round didn't do enough damage even if there were eight of them, as there were on Battle of Britain-era Hurricanes and Spitfires.

Given that sufficient 20mm cannon weren't yet available and the UK had not adopted the 0.5in round (and had no lines making the weapons or ammunition anyway) the only alternative was to put more .303s on until a suitable volume of fire was reached. I would imagine that 12 was about as many guns as the wings could comfortably carry before you had to start mounting them in the fuselage too, at which point the weight of all those Brownings starts to make intercepting your foes difficult in any case.

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ComposerNo5151@reddit

It was a prototype 'Utility Fighter'. It was built by Philips &Powys Aircraft Ltd, though it bore the name of its designer Frederick Miles, as would the company from 1943. The aircraft was built under strict austerity, wooden construction, no retracting undercarriage (or any other hydraulics), use of existing power plant (the fuselage was designed to take the standard Beaufighter IIs Merlin XX), standard parts wherever possible, etc.

In a report submitted by Sir Archibald Sinclair in December 1940 he concluded that the M.20's performance was not good enough for day use.

This is in fact the second prototype built to the same contract as the first (B140247/40). It first flew in April 1941, long after the Battle of Britain. The Specification F.19/40 was for eight machine guns, not twelve. The aircraft received the RAF serial DR616. It made a couple of visits to Boscombe Down in the summer of 1941 and the reports were generally positive. In September 1941 the aircraft made a brief visit to the RAE at Farnborough, but was back with the manufacturer by the end of the month. It went to No. 24 Squadron on 21 February 1942 (for some reason) but was returned to the manufacturer on 19 March and placed in storage. It was struck of charge on 22 May 1943 and subsequently broken up.

It was never ordered into peoduction. Fighter Command's defeat of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and then the adoption of the 'Hurricat' to fill the short term requirements of convoy defence saw to that.

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