Sunday, May 1, 2011

Austria - 1917 Hansa-Brandenburg L.16

More Austrian Triplane Madness

Hansa-Brandenburg L.16 - 1917
Hansa-Brandenburg L.16 - 1917

I have been working on this particular profile on and off for a while. But today I thought it was time to quit procrastinating and get busy.

The Hansa-Brandenburg L.16 was a single-seat equi-span fighter, developed by Hansa-Brandenburg for the Austro-Hungarian K.u.k. Luftfahrttruppen. It had a distinctive triplane configuration with aerofoil-section I-type interplane bracing struts. The L.16 was powered by a 185 hp (138 kW) Austro-Daimler six-cylinder water-cooled engine. The proposed armament for the L.16 consisted of two synchronized Schwarzlose machine guns. Various coolant radiator arrangements were evaluated on the single prototype built. Evaluation flights proved the fighter did not perform well enough to warrant series production. The development of this design was abandoned.

2 comments:

Jon Yuengling said...

It is ashame it did not perform well. It has clean lines.

Unknown said...

I agree Jon, unfortunately if you look at the successful triplanes there
is one common denominator. Both the Sopwith triplane and the Dr.I were light-weight compact fighters with steel tube and canvas airframes. Who knows, if they had designed it as a biplane it might have been a good flyer.