COBI Fairey Swordfish Set 5770

COBI's Fairey Swordfish is a 1:32 model built from 806 blocks, 34 cm long with a 43 cm wingspan. Two Royal Navy aircrew figures in flying helmets and heavy fur-lined jackets are included, along with a Vickers machine gun, a brick-built 18-inch Mark XII torpedo and a collector's plaque. No stickers.

Too slow to be shot down

The Swordfish was a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit and a top speed of around 220 km/h, and it was obsolete when the war started. It outlasted the aircraft designed to replace it and was still flying on the day the war in Europe ended.

Part of the reason is genuinely absurd. German warships used mechanical fire-control predictors to aim their anti-aircraft guns, and those predictors had a minimum speed setting below which they could not compute a solution. A Swordfish on a torpedo run flew slower than the gunners' equipment could handle, so the shells went in front of it.

The fabric covering helped too. Cannon shells fused to detonate against metal often passed clean through a Swordfish without going off, leaving a neat hole in the canvas and nothing else.

Crews called it the Stringbag — not for its construction but because, like a housewife's string shopping bag, it seemed to stretch to hold anything: torpedo, bombs, depth charges, mines, rockets, flares.

It sank more Axis tonnage than any other Allied aircraft of the war, and it crippled the Bismarck.

In the COBI range

Set 5769 is the Executive Edition with 959 pieces, three figures and a display stand.

Specifications

Pieces: 806 · Figures: 2 · Scale: 1:32 · Torpedo and plaque included · No stickers
Model dimensions: 34 × 43 × 10.5 cm (13.4 × 16.9 × 4.1 in)