Parnall G.4/31
general-purpose British military biplane
The Parnall G.4/31 was a 1930s design from the George Parnall and Company to meet Air Ministry Specification G.4/31 for a "general purpose" aircraft.
Design and development
The Parnall G.4/31 design would be as a replacement for the Westland Wapiti and Fairey Gordon. As such it needed to be usable as a day and night bomber as well as the reconnaissance, torpedo and dive-bombing roles. Designs were offered by Handley Page, Vickers, Fairey and Armstrong Whitworth as well as Parnall.
The G.4/31 was a large angular biplane with fixed spatted wheel spats powered by a 690 hp (515 kW) Bristol Pegasus IM3 with a Townend ring. There was a single forward-firing machine gun for the pilot and a Scarff ring mounted Lewis gun for the observer. Underwing bomb racks on the lower wings and provision to carry a torpedo between the main undercarriage units was also envisioned.
After the prototype was rolled out in 1935, a number of changes were made to the airframe and tail surfaces, when results from wind tunnel testing by the Royal Aeronautical Establishment (R.A.E.) with models revealed problems in spinning. Modifications to the fin, rudder, elevators and rear fuselage were necessary.
Testing
First flying at the Parnall factory in Yate, Bristol, in 1935 with Captain Howard John Saint at the controls, it was not delivered for evaluation by the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) at Martlesham Heath until early 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parnall G.4/31” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.