Buzzard of a Sort

I had a look around (or at least Google did) to see what else there was I could tell you about buzzards. They don’t actually do much so there isn’t a lot you can say. We do have a nice picture of one, just hanging around, so I felt you wouldn’t mind if we drifted off to other topics.

Did you know that the Buzzard Oilfield is the largest oilfield found in the last twenty five years? It’s just over there, a bit up and to the right, in the Outer Moray Firth. The oil is between eight and nine thousand feet below sea level. As there isn’t much gas in with the oil they have to pump water down, to get the oil to come up.

Rolls-Royce scaled up the Kestrel engine and produced a Buzzard, towards the end of the 1920s it wasn’t a tremendous success, only about a hundred were sold. It did however, lead to the Rolls-Royce R engine, an engine that was designed specifically for racing. Racing aeroplanes was very popular at that time, one of these powered the Supermarine S6B to more than four hundred miles an hour in 1931 and the development work done became the basis for the Merlin engine that went into the Spitfire.

Then there was the Martinsyde F4 Buzzard a single seater fighter designed and built just in time to be cancelled as the First World War ended.

A bit of a shame as it was a great little plane by all accounts.