Friday, April 1, 2011

France - 1916 Nieuport-11C

Je' suis Le Grande Canard!

Nieuport Triplane - 1916
Nieuport Triplane - 1916

I can hear you groaning, "Oh no! another odd bird!" Yes, I have a passion for bizarre aircraft. When I first saw a drawing of this aircraft I took a old Airfix Nieuport 17 kit I had not built and kit-bashed one for my very own. Needless to say when I started doing computer drawn aircraft profiles I had to make one out of pixels. This example is one of the triplanes evaluated by the RFC.

The First World War had more than its share of journeys down the wrong road of development. During the triplane craze every design firm churned out their own attempt at creating the new wonder weapon. Many manufacturers modified existing airframes for use as triplanes, none of them were particularly impressive.

The Nieuport Triplane was an experimental design built by the French and tested by the British Royal Flying Corps. As with many of the attempts to build successful triplanes by aircraft manufactures, the design was doomed to failure. The design was never adopted as a production aircraft because of the poor handling characteristics due to the aircraft's unusual wing configuration.

2 comments:

Paul´s Bods said...

You´ve got some cracking pics here!!!!!
Cheers
paul

Unknown said...

Thanks Paul. I'm still learning new tricks of the trade. Practice makes possible.