The RAF as a service and the Air Ministry's policy priorities require separate treatment, and neither was simply malicious toward the Royal Navy. The RAF counted the Fleet Air Arm within Britain's total air strength, but naval aviation remained peripheral to an institution increasingly committed to multi-engine strategic bombers. Engine shortages and the belief that the bomber would always get through made that hierarchy especially consequential. Inter-war naval-aircraft shortcomings arose from force structure and resource allocation as well as from individual designs.
Chapter · 26:40-28:32
Why Air Ministry priorities constrained the Fleet Air Arm
Institutional control placed naval aviation behind the RAF's heavy-bomber program even though the Royal Navy paid for much of the Fleet Air Arm.