Blackburn Roc

The Blackburn B-25 Roc was a British Second World War-era Fleet Air Arm fighter aircraft designed by Blackburn Aircraft Ltd. It took its name from the mythical bird of the tales of the Arabian Nights, the Roc. Derived from Blackburn's Skua and developed in parallel, the Roc differed in its adoption of a turret for its armament. Operationally, the Roc came to be viewed as inferior to existing aircraft, such as the Skua, and the type only had a brief frontline service.
Design and development
On 31 December 1935, the British Air Ministry issued Specification O.30/35 for a carrier-based turret-armed fighter. Blackburn proposed a derivative of their Skua dive bomber, of which two prototypes had been ordered for the Fleet Air Arm earlier that year, while Boulton Paul proposed the P.85, a redesigned version of its land-based Defiant P.82 turret fighter with either a Hercules radial or Merlin in-line engine. Although the "Sea Defiant" was expected to be 85 mph...