'Fleet Ghost' - the strangest reconnaissance aircraft of World War II

These unusually shaped reconnaissance aircraft, part of the "Fleet Ghost" project, were developed by the British Navy to counter enemy warships.

A Fleet Shadower upon completion of construction. Photo: War is Boring.

In the period leading up to World War II, the British Navy relied primarily on battleships. To aid in reconnaissance at sea, in 1938, they commissioned two aircraft manufacturers, General Aircraft and Airspeed, to develop prototype reconnaissance aircraft. The result was some of the strangest aircraft of World War II, according to War is Boring.

This project, codenamed Fleet Shadower, resulted in the GAL38 from General Aircraft and the AS39 from Airspeed. Both were designed for covert nighttime reconnaissance missions, capable of taking off and landing on aircraft carriers, possessing a long range, and a relatively low minimum speed. This allowed the aircraft to hover and monitor enemy warships for hours at a time.

All Fleet Shadowers used a single-wing configuration mounted on top of the fuselage. The GAL38 was equipped with a 130-horsepower Pobjoy Niagara III engine, providing up to 11 hours of continuous operation, nearly double that of the AS39 with its Niagara V engine. However,AS39It has a minimum speed of 52 km/h, lower than the 62 km/h on the General Aircraft model.

These two reconnaissance aircraft models had a very unusual front fuselage, with two separate sections. The crew consisted of three people, with the reconnaissance officer seated in the forward observation turret, while the radio operator sat in the rear. The pilot sat in a separate cockpit above, without interfering with target tracking operations.

The two Fleet Shadower models differ primarily in their engines. Photo: Alternathistory.

Naval expert Norman Polmar described the Fleet Shadower as among "the strangest carrier-based aircraft ever to appear." In theory, the Fleet Shadower wasn't a bad idea. However, by the time these two aircraft took their first test flights in 1940, they were completely obsolete.

Had they appeared 10 years earlier, they might have been commissioned by the British Navy. But the reality of naval warfare in the Atlantic showed that the main danger came from submarines, requiring equipment far different from slow-speed reconnaissance aircraft, which were designed only for naval battles between surface fleets.

During that same period, bombers optimized for maritime patrol missions were far superior to the Fleet Shadower in both range and target identification capabilities. As a result, only one GAL38 and one AS39 were produced before the project was canceled.

According to VNE