Avro Lancaster

The Avro Lancaster is a British four-engine heavy bomber designed under Roy Chadwick at Avro and built by Avro and five other companies across Britain and Canada, first flying on January 9, 1941, and entering Royal Air Force service in February 1942. Powered by four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, it carried an unobstructed 33-foot bomb bay that could hold the largest ordnance in the RAF's arsenal, and a total of 7,377 Lancasters were built. Lancaster crews dropped 608,612 long tons of bombs across 156,000 sorties during the Second World War, and the aircraft became famous for Operation Chastise in May 1943, the raid on Germany's Ruhr Valley dams using specially designed bouncing bombs, and later for carrying the 22,000-pound Grand Slam earthquake bomb, the largest payload carried by any bomber of the war.