Rolls-Royce Vulture

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The Rolls-Royce Vulture (and the related Peregrine) were aircraft engines, and probably the least successful power units ever produced by Rolls-Royce.

They were part of a program to develop power levels beyond that of the Merlin (1,100 hp, 820 kW in the early production versions) - a program that also resulted in creations like the Napier Sabre.

The Peregrine (a supercharged Kestrel) was a fairly standard design (at first sight) with two cylinder banks arranged in a V form and with a displacement of 22 litres. It was only used in the Westland Whirlwind twin-engined fighter. The Vulture was basically two Peregrines joined at the crankcase, producing an X engine configuration with a displacement of 44 litres.

Both seem to have suffered from a far too short pre-service development period and the reliability was very poor. Apart from being seriously under the designed-power, in the Vulture's case the problem was the frequent failure of the big-end bearings, found to be caused by a breakdown in lubrication. Rolls-Royce were confident that they could solve the problems, however the company's much smaller Merlin had already reached the same power-level as the Vulture had been designed for and so production of the Vulture was discontinued.

The Vulture had been intended to go into the Hawker Tornado but with the cancellation of Vulture development, Hawker's abandoned the Tornado and concentrated on the Napier Sabre version, the Typhoon. Likewise, the same cancellation caused the abandonment of the Vulture-engined version of the Vickers Warwick bomber.

The only type using the Vulture to actually go into production was the Avro Manchester which was powered by two of them. When the engine reliability issues became clear the Avro team (who had designed a four Merlin version as a contingency plan) persuaded the Air Ministry that switching to a four Merlin version was preferable to retooling the factories to make Handley Page Halifaxes. This was initially called the Manchester Mark III and then renamed Lancaster.