Martin BM
1929 attack aircraft family
The Martin BM was a 1930s American torpedo bomber built by the Glenn L. Martin Company for the United States Navy.
Design and development
To meet the requirement for a special-purpose dive bomber for the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps, the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics designed a biplane with fixed-tailwheel landing gear designated Bureau Design 77. It had room for two crew in tandem. Two prototypes were ordered in June 1928, one from Martin (designated the XT5M-1) and one from the Naval Aircraft Factory (designated the XT2N-1).
Martin moved to a new factory in Baltimore, Maryland, where the XT5M-1 was built, and it was first flown on 17 May 1929. It was powered by a 525 horsepower (391 kW) Pratt & Whitney R-1690-22 Hornet radial engine. During testing, the aircraft suffered structural damage during a pullout from a dive and had to be returned to the factory. After a redesign and rebuilding of the wings, the XTM5-1 was handed over to the Navy in May 1930 for service trials. Following further tests during 1930, the Navy ordered 12 aircraft with a more powerful R-1690-44 engine in April 1931, designating them the BM-1. A further order for four BM-1 aircraft was followed by an order in October 1931 for 16 of the BM-2, a variant with minor improvements.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3938216. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1929, 1690 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin BM” 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.