Rolls-Royce aircraft piston engines

Rolls Royce produced a number of piston engines for aircraft use in the first half of the 20th Century.

In 1915, the Eagle, Falcon, and Hawk engines were developed in response to wartime needs. The Eagle was very successful, especially for bombers. It was scaled down by a factor of 5:4 to make the Falcon or by deleting one bank of its V12 cylinders to make the Hawk. The smaller engines were intended for fighter aircraft. Subsequently it was enlarged to make the Condor which saw use in airships.

The Kestrel was a post-war redesign of the Eagle featuring wet cylinder liners in (two) common cylinder blocks. It was developed into the supercharged Peregrine and later the Goshawk. The Vulture was essentially two Peregrines on a common crankshaft in an X-24 configuration.

The Buzzard was a racing engine of Condor size, developed in its most extreme form into the Rolls-Royce R.

The Rolls-Royce Merlin, and later the development of the Buzzard, the Rolls-Royce Griffon were the two most successful designs for Rolls Royce to serve in the Second World War, the Merlin powering RAF fighters the Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, fighter/bomber de Havilland Mosquito, Lancaster and Halifax heavy bombers and also foreign aircraft such as the American P-51 Mustang and some marks of Kittyhawk.

Experimental engines were developed as alternatives for high performance aircraft such as the H-24 configuration Rolls-Royce Eagle 22, the 2-stroke Rolls-Royce Crecy and the Rolls-Royce Pennine and Rolls-Royce Exe. However the successful development of the Merlin and Griffon, and the introduction of jet engines precluded significant production of these types.

References

* "Rolls-Royce Piston Aero Engines - a designer remembers", A A Rubbra, Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust ISBN 1-872922-00-7
* "Rolls-Royce Aero Engines", Bill Gunston, Patrick Stephens Limited (Haynes Group) ISBN 1-85260-037-3
* "Not Much of an Engineer", Sir Stanley Hooker, Airlife Publishing, ISBN 0-906393-35-3