Orbiting the Beacon

DESCRIPTION: "Number One has got a Beau, Fitted with a gun or so, Will it fire? Oh dear no, So he's orbiting the beacon... It's quite all right in the middle of the night, Orbiting the beacon." Other pilots have problems which cause them to stay near base, orbiting
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1967 (Ward-Jackson/Lucas-AirmansSongBook)
KEYWORDS: pilot technology disaster
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Ward-Jackson/Lucas-AirmansSongBook, pp. 153-154, "Orbiting the Beacon" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [233 words]: Air missions -- especially bombing missions far into German territory -- had high casualty rates, so there was a tendency for pilots to turn back on the slightest excuse. I rather suspect that is the backdrop of this song.
The interesting question is, what aircraft is meant in the song? The plane is called a "Beau," and Ward-Jackson/Lucas-AirmansSongBook suggests that this is a reference to the Bristol Beaufighter, Britain's most successful two-engine fighter of the war. It wasn't particularly fast (no better than 330 miles per hour, according to Gunston, p. 28), but it was more heavily armed than almost any plane in the war (four 20 mm cannon plus sundry machine guns, according to Munson, p. 35); any plane that came within its sights was likely to be chopped to pieces in short order. And it had enough engine power that there was eventually a "Torbeau" model that was adapted to torpedo bombing.
But the Beaufighter wasn't the only plane that might be called a "Beau." The Beaufighter was actually an adapted version of an earlier bomber, the Bristol Beaufort, intended from the start to be a torpedo bomber (Munson, p. 36). This plane was far less successful in its role, but several thousand of them were built -- and, because they weren't spectacularly good, their pilots might have been more prone to abandon missions than were the hotshot Beaufighter pilots. Or so it seems to me. - RBW
Bibliography

Gunston: Bill Gunston, The Illustrated Directory of Fighting Aircraft of World War II, Salamander Books, 1988, 2002
Munson: Kenneth Munson, Aircraft of World War II, second edition, Doubleday, 1972

Last updated in version 6.8
File: WJL153

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