| Vulture | |
|---|---|
| Type | Piston X-24 aero engine |
| Manufacturer | Rolls-Royce Limited |
| First run | May 1937 |
| Major applications | Avro Manchester Hawker Henley Vickers Warwick |
| Number built | 538 |
The Rolls-Royce Vulture was a British aero engine developed shortly before World War II that was designed and built by Rolls-Royce Limited. The Vulture used the unusual "X-24" configuration, whereby four cylinder blocks using the earlier V12 Kestrel cylinder bore and stroke dimensions were joined by a common crankshaft using a single crankcase. The engine was originally designed to produce around 1,750 horsepower (1,300 kW), but continuing problems with the Vulture design meant that the engines were derated to around 1,450-1,550 hp in service by limiting the maximum running speed.[1]
Although several new aircraft designs had been planned to use the Vulture, work on the engine's design ended in 1941 as Rolls concentrated on their more successful Merlin design. Another engine produced to the same criteria, the Napier Sabre, would prove more successful after a lengthy development period.
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The supercharged Kestrel was a fairly standard design, with two cylinder banks arranged in a V form and with a displacement of 21 litres (1,300 cu in). The Vulture, in effect, was two Kestrels joined at the crankcase, producing an X engine configuration with a displacement of 42 litres (2,600 cu in) although the Vulture used redesigned cylinder blocks with increased cylinder spacing to accommodate a longer crankshaft. The increase in crankshaft length was necessary for extra main bearings and big end design considerations.[2]
The engine suffered from a far too short pre-service development period and the reliability of the Vulture was very poor. Apart from delivering significantly less than the designed power, the Vulture suffered from frequent failures of the big end connecting-rod bearings, which was found to be caused by a breakdown in lubrication, and also from other engine heat dissipation problems. Rolls-Royce were initially confident that they could solve the problems, but the company's much smaller Merlin had already reached the same power level as the Vulture's original specification, and so production of the Vulture was discontinued after only 538 had been built.[3]
The Vulture had been intended to power the Hawker Tornado interceptor, but with the cancellation of Vulture development, Hawker abandoned the Tornado and concentrated on the Hawker Typhoon, which was powered by the Napier Sabre. Likewise, the same cancellation caused the abandonment of the Vulture-engined version of the Vickers Warwick bomber.
The only aircraft type designed for the Vulture to actually go into production was the twin-engined Avro Manchester. When the engine reliability problems became clear, the Avro team persuaded the Air Ministry that switching to a four-Merlin version of the Manchester, which had been in development as a contingency plan, was preferable to retooling Avro's factories to make the Handley Page Halifax. The resulting aircraft was initially called the Manchester Mark III and then renamed Lancaster, going on to great success as the RAF's leading heavy bomber.
Data from Lumsden [5]
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