Talk:Handley Page Hampden

message: Why the "Flying Suitcase" nickname? could this be put in the article? It's mentioned in the intro paragraph but never explained. --82.133.79.7 09:29, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Because the flight compartment was tiny, with four men squeezed inside for hours on end. Drutt 14:13, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The cited source may say that, but it was actually just because the flat-sided forward fuselage looked like a suitcase. Cramped accommodation was not exactly unusual in fighting aircraft. The Hampden was also known as 'the Flying Panhandle' for obvious and similarly visual reasons. Khamba Tendal (talk) 21:26, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

text: Exactly correct. If the cited source says that, the author is just pulling stuff out of his hat. The Flying Suitcase moniker very obviously refers to the thin, slab sided, rectangular shape of the main fuselage, exactly like a suitcase. I don't know if I could find a reference for that, because it's the sort of thing most authors consider too obvious to bother spelling out. Moat of them will only say "...called the Flying Suitcase, for obvious reason", or "a glance at this photograph makes the reason for the Flying Suitcase nickname immediately apparent". If a cramped interior was all you needed to be called a piece of luggage, why isn't the A-20 Havoc "The Flying Duffel Bag", or the Fairey Battle called "Dead Man's Purse"? On the other hand, nicknames describing the external appearance of a plane are commonplace. The Flying Porcupine (for the rounded, fat fuselage and numerous ASV radar antennae sticking out of the fuselage sides, not for the number of defensive guns it carrie3d), The Flying Pencil, Forked Tailed Devil, The Flying Cigar, The Box the B-17 Came In, Duckbilled Platypus, The Jug (another one authors give a wrong explanation for, it is not short for Juggernaut, it is because it is shaped like a jug), The Flying Beer Barrel, The Flying Sewer Pipe, etc, etc.
64.222.88.237 (talk) 18:05, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: "Flying Suitcase" 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I've just been reading "Enemy Coast Ahead", by Guy Gibson, who led the Dambusters raid of 1943. In the book, he describes his times in the RAF between August 31st 1939 (when he receives an order to "Return to Unit immediately" just before the outbreak of war) and May 17th 1943 (when the Dambusters raid concludes). Before flying the Lancaster and the Beaufighter, Guy Gibson flew the Hampden a lot, so the Hampden features prominently in the early part of the book. I get the impression that Guy Gibson liked the Hampden, which I had never heard of (I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that 1430 of them were in fact built!). The most spectacular description of the Hampden is the time when, at night, Guy Gibson flies one "as low as possible", at 200 miles per hour, along a railway track in Germany. To light the way, they use the landing light and an Aldis lamp, held shining forward by the navigator. They drop two bombs, aiming them into the opening of a railway tunnel ahead.
" 'Here comes the tunnel. Bombs...bombs gone.'
"On the word 'gone' I slammed the throttles forward and remember seeing the tunnel spotlighted in our Aldis lamp before I yanked back the stick. The old Hampden, relieved of her bombs, went up like an elevator, and we just cleared a 400-foot cliff by a few feet. I remember this well because it was a white cliff with a chalk face, and we could see it quite clearly; eleven seconds later came that pleasant muffled crump, showing that we had reached our mark."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.147.165.78 (talk) 21:43, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: "Enemy Coast Ahead"