Avro Aircraft of World War One
The Type D was a two-bay biplane of conventional configuration, with equal-span, unstaggered wings. The fuselage was triangular in cross-section, and lateral control was provided by wing warping. The first of seven aircraft flew at Brooklands on 1 April 1911.
The Type Ds were used in a variety of roles by the Avro, mostly concerned with exploring the limits of what an aeroplane could do. In its first few weeks of existence, the prototype was used to make a number of attempts on aerial endurance records, as well as demonstrations for the Parliamentary Aerial Defence Committee.
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One Type D was purchased by the Royal Navy and fitted with floats for trials from HMS Hermione. This aircraft became the first British seaplane when it took off on 18 November 1911. Type Ds were also used for air racing, the prototype participating in one such event very early in its career. Another example was specially built and modified to compete in the Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Race, but crashed before the event. Other Type Ds remained in service until 1914.
The Type D is notable in two respects. First, the prototype was at one point fitted with floats to make the first British take-off from water on November 18, 1911. Secondly, it was a biplane rather than A.V. Roe's previous triplane wing designs. It is believed that six examples of the Type D, with its triangular shape fuselage, were manufactured. They were all different, including one example with a 60hp engine that was intended to compete in the Daily Mail Air Race, but suffered a prior accident. The Avro Type D was the company's first successful and semi-production standard design.
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The Avro Type E, Type 500, and Type 502 made up a family of early British military aircraft, regarded by Alliott Verdon Roe as his firm's first truly successful design.
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The Type E biplane was designed in response to a War Office specification for a two-seat aircraft capable (amongst other things) of carrying a 350 lb (160 kg) payload with a total endurance of 4.5 hours. The Avro submission was based on the Avro Duigan design and was originally named "Military Biplane 1". It was a two-bay biplane with equal-span, unstaggered wings, and a boxy, rectangular-section fuselage. Lateral control was by wing warping.
During initial trials, it soon became apparent that while top speed and rate-of-climb were below the War Office specification, the aircraft excelled in every other way. The second prototype, however, first flew on 3 May 1912 and sufficiently impressed the War Office for them to buy the prototype and place an order for two more examples, which Roe now renamed the 500. The type proved an immediate success, and orders for another four machines plus five single-seat derivatives (designated 502 by Avro) soon followed. Other examples produced included six for the British Admiralty's Air Department, one presented to the government of Portugal (paid for by public subscription), one kept by Avro as a company demonstrator, and one bought by a private individual, J. Laurence Hall (commandeered by the War Office at the outbreak of World War I). The first prototype was destroyed in a crash on 29 June 1913 that killed its student pilot.
Avro 500s were flown by the British armed forces during the first years of the war, mostly as trainers. In service, most were fitted with ailerons and a revised rudder.
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The Avro Type F was an early single seat British aircraft from Avro and the first aircraft in the world to feature a completely enclosed cabin.
It was a wire-braced mid-wing monoplane of conventional configuration with a tailskid undercarriage. The fuselage itself was teardrop-shaped with flat sides and "glazed" with celluloid windows around the cabin. Two circular windows at the pilot's head level could be opened for the pilot's head to protrude when flying under poor visibility. Ingress and egress was via a trapdoor in the fuselage top. The cabin was quite cramped - at its widest point only 2 ft (60 cm) across.
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The Type F made a few test flights in mid 1912 until damaged beyond repair in a hard landing on 13 September after which it was not repaired. Its Viale 35 hp engine is on display at the Science Museum in London.
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The Avro Type H, Type 501, and Type 503 were a family of early British military seaplanes. They were a development of the Avro 500 design and were originally conceived of as amphibious; the prototype being fitted with a single large main float (equipped with wheels) under the fuselage, and two outrigger floats under the wings. Tests were conducted on Lake Windermere in January 1913. It was later converted to twin-float configuration and bought by the British Admiralty. It now, however, proved too heavy and was converted again - this time to a landplane.
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An improved version, designated the 503 was demonstrated for the Inspector of Naval Aircraft, who placed an order for three machines. The prototype itself was demonstrated for the German Navy in its seaplane trials in June 1913 and was purchased by the government of Imperial Germany for evaluation purposes. This machine subsequently became the first aircraft to fly across the North Sea, from Wilhelmshaven to Heligoland, in September 1913. Gotha purchased a licence from Avro and produced the type as the WD.1 (Wasser Doppeldecker - "Water Biplane"). Unlicenced copies were also built by Albatros, AGO, Friedrichshafen. Some WD.1s were provided to the Ottoman Empire following their withdrawal from German Navy service.
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Fairly sturdy and easy to fly, the Avro 504 was used by the Royal Naval Air Service to conduct bombing raids into German territory at the beginning of the war. The first plane to strafe troops on the ground, it was also the first British plane to be shot down by enemy ground fire. Better aircraft soon replaced the Avro 504 in combat, but it remained the standard British trainer for the duration of the war.
The Avro 523 Pike (the first Avro aircraft to receive a name) was a British multi-role combat aircraft of the First World War that did not progress past the prototype stage. It was intended to provide the Royal Naval Air Service with an anti-Zeppelin fighter that was also capable of long-range reconnaissance and light bombing.
The Avro Pike was a large, three-bay biplane of conventional layout driven by two pusher propellers. Three open cockpits were provided, the centre one for the pilot, and gunners fore and aft of him. The Admiralty evaluated the type, but rejected it. Avro then built a second prototype, changing the original's Sunbeam engines for Green E.6 engines instead and designating it the 523A.
The Admiralty evaluated this in November 1916, but found that the type was now obsolete and did not place an order. The two prototypes flew as testbeds with Avro for the remainder of the war.
The Avro 528 was an unsuccessful large span single engined biplane built to an Admiralty contract in 1916. It carried a crew of two; only one was built.
Very little is known about the Avro 528 apart from a photograph and a general arrangement diagram. It was a two seat single engined biplane ordered by the Admiralty in 1915, and not even the task for which it was intended is recorded. It had some similarities with the Avro 519 (a single seater intended for the RFC) and the twin seat 519A, built for the RNAS, though neither of these were armed and both had 150 hp Sunbeam Nubian engines rather than the 225 hp Sunbeam of the 528. Both the 519s and the 528 had some shared features with the Naval Avro 504.
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It was a large three bay biplane with unswept, unstaggered and constant chord wings of unequal span, the lower plane having a span 10 feet 0 inches (3.05 m) less than the upper. Ailerons were carried on the upper wings; both wings folded for storage. The fuselage had similarities with the Naval 504s though the overall length of the 528 was greater by about 4 feet (1.2 m): both had a generous fixed fin in contrast to the all moving, comma shaped rudder of the RFC's 504s. The vertical stabiliser was also close in size to that of the 504, but the rather rectangular horizontal tail was nearly 60% greater in span. Like the 519s, the top of the fuselage carried a raised decking that provided deeper cockpits for the pilot, placed under the trailing edge of the wing and the observer/gunner, in a separate cockpit close behind equipped with a ring mounted gun. The fixed single axle undercarriage had no central skid.
The Sunbeam engine drove a four bladed propeller and had a single, central and near vertical exhaust pipe. There were two radiators, mounted edge on (longitudinally) between the wings, rather than the single but similarly mounted radiators of the Avro 519s and the Avro 527. Two tank-like features are shown in both image and diagram on the lower wings just inboard of the innermost interplane struts; they may be fuel tanks.
The first flight was on 19 December 1916 at Avro's Hamble factory. The aircraft remained troublesome, with a variety of propellers being tried but the Admiralty lost interest and the 528 last flew in April 1917.
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The Avro 529 was a twin-engined biplane long-range bomber of the First World War. Two prototypes were built but no production ensued.
The Avro 529 was Avro's second twin-engined aircraft and their second attempt at a heavy bomber. Their first in both categories was the Pike, developed in early 1916 to Royal Flying Corps (RFC) guidelines for a short-range bomber. The Pike arrived too late to secure orders from the RFC who would order the Handley-Page O/100 and for the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) who had ordered the Short Bomber. Nonetheless, after trials of the Pike, the Admiralty ordered two prototypes of an enlarged Pike for a long range bomber role. This was the Type 529.
Like the Pike, it was a large twin-engined biplane of the then-standard wood and canvas construction. It had three-bay wings without sweepback, dihedral or stagger, partly to facilitate wing folding. The vertical tail was different to that of the Pike: it had a small, roughly triangular fin and a rudder with a round balance surface above the fin, a reminder of Avro's "comma" rudder form.
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The fuselage was rectangular in cross-section and seated three in separate cockpits. The pilot sat just forward of the wing leading edge, there was a gunner's position (with emergency dual control) mid-way between the trailing edge and the tail and the front gunner/bomb-aimer's position was in the nose. Both gunners' positions were provided with a 0.303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis Gun mounted on a Scarff ring. The landing gear used two main wheels on split axles, plus a tail-skid.
The two prototypes differed from each other chiefly in their powerplants. The first, just known as the Avro 529 had a pair of uncowled Rolls-Royce Falcon water-cooled in-line engines mounted midway between the wings. Each produced 190 hp (140 kW) and drove four-bladed, opposite-handed wooden airscrews. It carried 140 gal (636 L) of fuel in a tank in the centre fuselage.
The second machine, designated Type 529A had a pair 230 hp (170 kW) BHP in-line water-cooled engines, cowled and mounted in nacelles on the lower wing. These drove wooden, two-bladed airscrews. In this aircraft fuel was held in a pair of 60 gal (273 L), one in each nacelle. Fuel was pumped from these to 10 gal (45 L) tanks above the engines by wind-driven pumps, and fed to the motors under gravity.
The type 529A had slightly different wings to the first prototype, 13 in (33 cm) greater in span, smaller in area and hence of higher aspect ratio. It was about 8% lighter.
Another difference between the two prototypes were the arrangements for the bomb-aimer. In the first machine, this was done from the seat of the front cockpit, but in the 529A there was provision for a prone bomb-aimer's position with a small window, noticeable in side view. From there, he communicated with the pilot by Gosport tube. The 529A could carry 20 50 lb (20 kg) bombs racked nose up inside the fuselage between the lower wing spars.
The Type 529 was, even with the B.H.P. engines rather low powered, but seems to have handled well apart from poor elevator control. There was no production order and the type was not developed further.
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Of relatively clean aerodynamic design by contemporary standards and featuring a ducted propeller spinner, the Avro 530 two-seat fighter was designed in 1916 to compete with the Bristol F.2A, but the first prototype was not flown until July 1917. Powered by a 200hp Hispano- Suiza 8Bd eight-cylinder water-cooled engine, the Avro 530 was of wooden construction with fabric skinning, and mounted an armament of a single fixed and synchronised 7.7mm Vickers gun, a Lewis gun of similar calibre being mounted on a Scarff ring in the rear cockpit. Although performance of the Avro 530 proved to be good, it did not improve sufficiently on that of the Bristol F.2A to warrant production orders. Furthermore, priority in the supply of the Hispano- Suiza engine was being given to the S.E.5a. During 1918, one of the two Avro 530 prototypes was flown with a 200hp Sunbeam Arab engine, revised undercarriage, an extended tail fin and flapless wings of new section with long-span ailerons, but development was subsequently
The Avro 531 Spider was a British fighter aircraft built by Avro during the First World War. It did not proceed past the prototype stage.
An unsponsored private-venture single-seat fighter designed by Roy Chadwick and flown for the first time in April 1918, the Spider made use of a number of Avro 504 components and had a fabric-covered wooden structure with a system of Warren-girder steel-tube interplane struts.
The upper wing was mounted close to the fuselage and directly above the cockpit. In its original form, the Spider was powered by a 110hp Le Rhone 9J nine-cylinder rotary engine, and proved to possess exceptional manoeuvrability, but overall performance was not sufficiently in advance of the contemporary Sopwith Camel to warrant quantity production. Armament comprised one fixed synchronised 7.7mm Vickers machine gun, and a 130hp Clerget 9B rotary was later fitted.
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The Spider was a sesquiplane with a largely conventional configuration, but it used Warren truss-type interplane struts, hence the appellation "Spider". In tests, the aircraft demonstrated exceptional performance, handling, and pilot visibility. By the time it flew, the War Office had already selected the Sopwith Snipe for mass production.
A second, refined version, the 531A was apparently never completed, but some of its components seem to have been used to build a derivative design, the 538. This had standard interplane struts and was intended as a racing aircraft. It was never used for this purpose, however, since it was discovered that it had a faulty wing spar, so the Avro firm used it as a hack instead.
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