Toyo FD-25 Defender
The Defender, an American design, owed its inspiration to former Lockheed design engineer John Thorp, who sold his idea for a small, low-cost ground-support aircraft to the Fletcher brothers in 1950, soon after the outbreak of the Korean War. Three demonstration aircraft were built in the USA, the first being a single-seat FD-25B which was flown on April 14, 1951, and the second being a tandem two-seat FD-25A with a slightly longer fuselage.
Thorp’s idea was that such an aircraft, costing less than 10% as much as a complex jet fighter, was also far more suited to the type of low-level precision combat operations encountered in south-east Asian territories and was capable of carrying an equally lethal load.
The Defender, weighing only 1¼ tons fully laden, had a pair of 30 caliber wing-mounted Browning machine guns and under-wing racks for two 33-gallon napalm tanks, two 250-lb high-explosive or fragmentation bombs; up to forty 2.75-in folding-fin unguided rockets; four 5-in heavy rockets; or twenty 80-mm Oerlikon rockets. All models of the Defender were powered by a six cylinder, 225-hp Continental E-225-8 air-cooled engine. It was received enthusiastically at numerous demonstrations to field units throughout the USA, but no official support was gained and the US forces lost what would have today been a useful Counter Insurgency (COIN) type.
In 1952, the Toyo Koku K.K. in Tokyo realized the aircraft’s possibilities and acquired a manufacturing license for the Defender with the aim of selling it to several south-east Asian air forces. The first Toyo-built Defender (an FD-25B) was flown in March of 1953, but in August 1954 the company became bankrupt and production ceased. About half-a-dozen FD-25Bs had then been sold to the Cambodian air force, and two FD-25Bs and an FD-25A to North Vietnam. A number of the completed but unsold aircraft were stored at Fujisawa airfield in the Kanagawa Prefecture, and three of them were acquired by a Tokyo aeronautical engineering college early in 1961 for study purposes.
General characteristics• Crew: one pilot
• Length: 20 ft 11 in (6.38 m)
• Wingspan: 30 ft 0 in (9.14 m)
• Height: 5 ft 3 in (1.60 m)
• Wing area: 150 ft2 (13.9 m2)
• Empty weight: 1,421 lb (645 kg)
• Gross weight: 2,696 lb (1,223 kg)
• Powerplant: 1 × Continental E-225-8, 225 hp (167 kW) each
Performance• Maximum speed: 190 mph (300 km/h)
• Range: 834 miles (1,335 km)
• Service ceiling: 16,400 ft (5,000 m)
• Rate of climb: 1,720 ft/min (8.8 m/s)
Armament• 2 fixed, forward-firing .30 (7.62 mm) machine guns in wings
• 500 lb (230 kg) of disposable stores on eight underwing pylons, including bombs, rockets, and napalm tanks
Pictures
I think having this aircraft in Il-2 would add a great depth to the game. It would also be really fun to saturate the forest with a hail of lead and destruction in advance of my ground forces.
Hope you like this as much as I do.
Sincerely,
James
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Topic: Toyo FD-25 Defender (Read 3249 times)
