lyttelton76

Thanks for your thoughts Jure. Maybe Gomtuu is right, the catapult gear might interfere with it ?

Good thought - you're probably right. I have seen artwork of the Swordfish from HMS Malaya depicted with a torpedo but have also seen a photo of the same aircraft and it has no crutch underneath1

Hi Ig Wow - thanks for that,great photo and great model ! I also have the 1/32 one as well You've done a brilliant job on that 1 Regards, Malcolm

Thanks to everyone who has replied on this topic. Thanks John , I should have phrased the question a little better and asked if anyone had any evidence that they were used operationally. As I'm sure you know K5662 was a trials aircraft and all the photos around of Swordfish with torpedoes are of this aircraft. Though your photo on the Eagle is a clincher, and I think I will do mine in pre-war colours anyway. In the "in action" title it clearly states that the floatplane could carry all the same ordnance that the wheeled version could. My thoughts now are that pre war they were used in training exercises, but when it became a "shooting" war for some reason they were deemed impractical.As Claudio and Jure point out it may have been possible ,but not practical in operational circumstances.Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to look. Kind regards, Malcolm

Calling all Swordfish experts! I am building the Tamiya Swordfish floatplane and I was happily going to depict it carrying the torpedo as shown on the boxart and on various drawings in my references and on the net. By coincidence I was doing some reading on the Warspite at Narvik which is one of my next projects - the book I was perusing was "Warspite" by Ian Ballantyne. I was reading the account of the exploits of the Swordfish floatplane that Warspite had at the time, and I was surprised at the following statement by the pilot P.O.Fred Rice who had just spotted a U boat { U64} and I quote " With floats on a Swordfish you couldn't carry a torpedo. What we carried was 250lbs armour piercing bombs " { page 98}. Surely the pilot should know - are all the drawings etc. wrong? I have quite a lot of reference on the Swordfish, so I went through looking for photographs of floatplanes carrying torpedoes and could only find three, all of K5662, the first Swordfish on floats - two in the "in action" title and one in an Air enthusiast mag.Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks in advance, Malcolm