An innovation too far?

***image1***The design of World War I aircraft was not supported by such things as wind tunnels, so much of aircraft design was “let’s build it and see if it works.”

Airplanes were cheap and, with thousands of soldiers dying every day on the Western Front, so was the life of a test pilot. Additionally, practically anyone could design an airplane and one of the most interesting designs was by the French engineer Marcel de Bruyere – the de Bruyere C.1 “Canard” (“duck,” though it also means an airplane with fins in the nose.).

De Bruyere’s aircraft was an inverted “N” strutted biplane with an all-metal fuselage that looked very much like a motorcycle sidecar, smooth and streamlined with a large, single semi-recessed nose wheel and the two main wheels suspended below the lower wing in the middle of the fuselage, giving it a distinctive “nose down” attitude. The fuselage also had two large holes on either side of the pilot for downward visibility.

The large, one-piece, moveable canard was fitted in the extreme nose just in front of the pilot, and the aircraft was powered by a 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza 8a engine buried in the center of the fuselage, with a long shaft driving a two-bladed pusher propeller in the rear.

The nose-down attitude allowed the fitting of a large ventral fin and required a long tail skid to protect the propeller, but it may have been the final innovation on the Canard that was one too many. Instead of normal ailerons, the entire wing tip of the Canard rotated to provide, in theory, the same control as a conventional aileron.

The Canard was intended to carry the large 37-millimeter Hotchkiss M1902 cannon, a single shot, shell-firing weapon intended for ground attack and to counter the new, very large German bombers that were entering service. The Hotchkiss could either fire a one-pound high explosive shell or a one-and-a-half-pound incendiary shell and, despite its slow rate of fire, had some success in combat on other French aircraft.

In April 1917, the Canard was brought to the French Air Force test field at Etampes, Belgium for its initial test flights. Unfortunately, on takeoff it climbed a few meters into the air and then rolled over and crashed. There is some debate about whether the ailerons were too sensitive and the pilot unintentionally rolled the aircraft or whether the tail skid prevented the aircraft from getting its nose up high enough for a proper takeoff (or both). In the event, the Canard was not rebuilt and the program abandoned.

While it is easy to laugh at such aircraft as the Canard, it should be noted that it was a very advanced concept and one that seemed to have considerable merit. It was sleek and with its 150-horsepower engine, the same engine that powered the excellent SPAD VII fighter, there is no reason to suppose its performance would have been other than sprightly.

Its 37-millimeter Hotchkiss cannon, which the pilot could easily access to (relatively) rapidly load, was certainly a useful weapon and could have made it a formidable attack machine. Unfortunately, the lack of testing protocols meant it had to be pushed into the air without serious examination of possible problem areas, and the Canard – like many other excellent and advanced aeronautical concepts at the time – was a failure.

Questions or comments, contact Dr. Michel at marshall.michel@ramstein.af.mil.