P-61 Black Widow

The Most Chilling Plane of WW2
Only Planes

This night fighter airplane was developed almost entirely during WW2. It only came into service in the last year of the war. It was the first American aircraft to carry its own intercept radar. Only 700 were built, unlike the 10,000 or so of each of the models of conventional fighters built by both all countries.

Black Widow Radar Origins

In August 1940, sixteen months before the United States entered the war, the U.S. Air Officer in London, Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, was briefed on British research in radar ("Radio Detection And Ranging" as it was then known), which had been underway since 1935, and had played an important role in the nation's defense against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. General Emmons was informed of the new Airborne Intercept radar (AI for short), a self-contained unit that could be installed in aircraft, and operated independently of ground stations. In September 1940, the Tizard Mission traded British research, including the cavity magnetron that would make self-contained interception radar installations practicable, for American production.

Anode Block of Original Cavity Magnetron
About 10 centimeters in diameter

The Tizard Mission

The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a delegation from the United Kingdom that visited the United States during World War II to share secret research and development (R&D) work that had military applications. It received its popular name from the programme's instigator, Henry Tizard, a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, which had orchestrated the development of radar.

The mission travelled to the U.S. in September 1940 during the Battle of Britain. They conveyed a number of British technical and scientific secrets with the objective of securing U.S. assistance in sustaining the war effort and obtaining the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of these technologies, which Britain itself could not fully use, due to the immediate demands of other war-related production.

Referring to one such British secret, a device known as a resonant cavity magnetron, American historian James Phinney Baxter III later wrote, "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores." The mission also opened up channels of communication for jet engine and atomic bomb development, leading to the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, and catalyzed Allied technological cooperation during World War II.