Nieuport Delage XI BEBE
The Nieuport XI was a French World War I single seat fighter. It reached the French front in January 1916, and 90 were in service within the month. Nieuport 11's were supplied to the Aviation Militaire, the Royal Naval Air Service, the Dutch air service, Belgian, Russia and Italy. (More than 450 were license produced by Italian companies.) It is famous as one of the aircraft that ended the Fokker Scourge of 1915.
Gustave Delage's answer to the Fokker menace was a scaled down version of the Nieuport 10 two seater. This small, lightly loaded sesquiplane (in fact, pilots called it Bébé) was not only faster than the Eindeckers, it could literally fly circles around the German design. The Nieuport used ailerons for lateral control, compared to the Fokker's obsolete wing warping technology - and its elevator was attached to a conventional tail plane as opposed to the balanced "Morane type" elevators of the Fokker, making it much easier to fly accurately.
A sesquiplane is a biplane with a full-sized top wing with two spars, while the lower wing has a much smaller chord and is built around only one spar. A "Vee" strut joins the single spar of the lower wing with the broader upper wing. The main drawback is that unless it is very strongly built, the lower wing is very prone to twist and bend under stress, and in fact this was a problem with the type, as well as with the later Nieuports, and the German Albatros D.III, which adopted a similar wing design.
The Fokker Eindecker's only advantage in combat over the XI was that its machine gun was synchronized to fire through its propeller. At the time, the Allies did not possess a similar system, but the Nieuport XI biplane design meant that a Lewis or Hotchkiss machine gun could be mounted on the top wing to fire over the propeller, achieving similar results, although there were problems with clearing gun jams and replacing ammunition drums in flight. These difficulties were eventually solved in British service with the invention of the Foster mounting, but by that time newer Nieuports in French service had their own synchronised guns.
Some Nieuport XI were modified to fire 8 "Le Prieur" rockets from the struts. They were very efficient against observation balloons and airships.
Operators
- Belgium
- Czechoslovakia
- France
- Italy
- Netherlands
- Romania
- Russia
- Serbia (Yugoslavia)
- Siam (two aircraft)
- Ukraine (one aircraft only)
- United Kingdom
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