From The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 To The P-51 Mustang | WWII Battle Of The Engines | Engineering Pioneers

The WWII race to the best engines. The story of how the Rolls Royce Merlin engine equipped the extraordinary P-51 Mustang and the evolution of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190’s engine, all the way to the story of the first functioning centrifugal turbojet in April 1937, Frank Whittle’s creation. The Rolls-Royce Merlin is a British liquid-cooled V-12 piston aero engine of 27-litres (1,650 cu in) capacity. Rolls-Royce designed the engine and first ran it in 1933 as a private venture. Initially known as the PV-12, it was later called Merlin following the company convention of naming its four-stroke piston aero engines after birds of prey. After several modifications, the first production variants of the PV-12 were completed in 1936. The first operational aircraft to enter service using the Merlin were the Fairey Battle, Hawker Hurricane, and Supermarine Spitfire. The Merlin remains most closely associated with the Spitfire and Hurricane, although the majority of the production run was for the four-en