An airplane with two main wings.
The Wright brothers’ Wright Flyer, used a biplane design, as did most airplanes in the early years of aviation. While a biplane wing structure has a structural advantage, it produces more drag than a similar monoplane wing. Improved structural techniques and materials, and the need for greater speed, made the biplane configuration obsolete for most purposes by the late 1930s.
Biplanes include sesquiplanes, which feature a small lower wing.
While it resembled, both in appearance and in specifications, the D.H.2, J. Kenworth’s F.E.8 was considerably less successful. But problems with the aircraft’s stability and engine development delayed its deployment at the front until August, 1916, and by then the new German Albatros D.I and D.II wholly outclassed the British pusher biplanes like the F.E.8.. [...]
Arriving at the front in February 1916, the Airco D.H.2 was fairly late in the British series of fighter pusher biplanes. A single-seater, it was considerably faster and more agile than the Vickers Gun-bus, and enjoyed some successes against the Fokkers in early 1916. But improved German models soon surpassed it. About 450 were built.
The [...]
Visitors to Britain’s Olympia Air Show in March, 1913 had the chance to see the world’s first fighter plane; called a “Destroyer,” the Vickers Experimental Fighting Biplane (E.F.B.) was the first aircraft specifically designed to shoot down other airplanes.
As their engineers had not yet figured out how to fire a machine gun though the [...]
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An effective response and a worthy adversary to the Fokker Eindekkers, the F.E.2b appeared in September, 1915. It was a two-seater, pusher biplane, that was quite speedy and allowed for two machine guns, one firing forward, and one (albeit awkwardly) firing rearward over the upper wing. The ‘pusher’ concept would soon be [...]
THE 1912 B. E. (BRITISH EXPERIMENTAL)
In 1912 the British Government, realizing the importance of the airplane as a war-machine for scouting purposes, established the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farmborough, with Geoffrey de Havilland, one of the early British experimenters, as designer. Machines of his invention have been called D. H.’s. His 1912 airplane, the [...]
In 1915, when the British Empire forces (mostly Indians and Australians) attacked the Turks in Mesopotamia, they needed aircraft. Or wanted them; perhaps it was a matter of national pride, that every modern army ought to have air support. At any rate, the Rajah of Gwalior underwrote the expense of the air contingent – a [...]
Avro 504A
Avro 504B
Avro 504J
Produced by Alliott Verdon Roe, Britain’s great pioneering aircraft designer, the Avro 504 trained nearly every British pilot in the Great War; over 8,000 were built. Especially suitable for the purpose of training pilots, it was the standard training machine of the Royal Air Force. The plane’s diagnostic feature is the the [...]
On the morning of October, 5, 1914, French Sergeant pilot Joseph Frantz and mechanic Corporal Quenault in their Voisin biplane spotted a German Aviatik flying at about 3500 ft. He closed on until Quenault found the range and opened fire with a light machine gun. The Aviatik dove away, but Frantz followed, Quenault firing intermittently. [...]
Known to Allied aviators as the German “Spad,” the Albatros D.I, Appearing in 1916, is a high-speed type of machine, technically termed a destroyer and armed with two machine guns. The one shown in Fig. 48 was shot down in the British lines. It is a conglomerate copy of the French Nieuport and [...]
The Halberstadt biplane, was used in large numbers by the Germans during 1916, but, as it was almost invariably downed by French and British flyers, it apparently has since been abandoned. A brief review of its salient points shows that it would tend to be unstable to a degree unknown in any of [...]
