There were many within RAF Fighter Command that were very anti-cannon……a certain bloke called Bader for one, largely because of the problems the RAF had seen with them during trials and combat testing.

Despite the nose installation on the Whirlwind, the early Hispano’s were still prone to the same reliability issue and were also drum mag feed, with only 60 rds per gun, which was hardly adequate. This wasn’t a problem in the Beaufighter of course because the cannon were mounted under the floor and the 2nd crew member could change the drum mags on the cannons, as they did for the early nightfighter versions. The decision to not build any more Whirlwinds was taken before they solved the Hispano cannon problems.

I don’t think there was this Supermarine fan worship that you seem to think at the time, it was Hurricanes we needed during 1940, less so Spits. The Hurricane was easier to repair and service with the skills in the RAF ground crews at the time, and consumed less critical materials to build. The Spitfire (and the Whirlwind with its alloy construction and magnesium rear fuselage skins) were very new tech, so both had opponents in the Ministry at the time for those reasons, when our backs were to the wall in terms of production.

Range, speed and altitude are all preferable for PR work, and while without cannons fitted the Whirlwind would have had needed range, (drop tanks were not developed) its big problem again, was the Peregrine engines, which struggled at altitude…..where performance tailed off a lot once above 20,000 ft and it just couldn’t get above 30,000. This is why once the BofB was over the 2 x Whirlwind squadrons were employed successfully in the low level cross channel fighter sweeps once the RAF went over to the offensive. Good low level performance with the punch from the cannons put them in their ideal environment. As such, if they had built more, it probably could have had a successful and useful combat life in North Africa and the Med theatres? We’ll never know.

The Whirlwind entered service just as the BoB started, so sending them to Scotland was a sensible decision to allow the personal to work up to operational status. The other issue that Whirlwind had, was it had quite a high landing speed for the day (a trait seen on most of Petter’s designs) so it was operationally limited in terms of the airfields it could operate from at the time, again an issue during the height of the Battle when the Luftwaffe were bombing the crap out of our airfields and fighters were being dispersed to satellite airfields around the south-east.

It was a great advanced design for its time (Teddy Petter went on to design the EE Canberra and EE Lightning post war) it was just let down by the choice of engine, and which at that point in time, couldn’t have the resources it needed to iron out the problems or develop it further, as it was already an out of date engine design in 1939, and why would you do that when we needed all the Merlins we could get for single seat defense fighters.

You seem to think there was some sort of conspiracy against the Whirlwind, rather than it was just the right aircraft with the wrong engines at the wrong time. As I said, had it entered service a year earlier in 1939…..things might have been a lot different.

What is a shame is that there are none left……one was sent over to the USAicon for evaluation, after they were withdrawn from frontline service, but was scrapped in Florida just before the war ended, and even worse, Westlands kept one flying as a company hack and comms aircraft for its test pilots before it too was scrapped without thought in 1947