Nieuport 11

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nieuport 11

Description
Role	Fighter
Crew	Pilot
First Flight
Entered Service	5 January 1916
Manufacturer	Nieuport
Dimensions
Length	18 ft 6 in	5.64 m
Wingspan	24 ft 8 in	7.52 m
Height	7 ft 10.5 in	2.4 m
Wing area	143.16 ft²	13.30 m²
Weights
Empty	705 lb	320 kg
Loaded	1,058 lb	480 kg
Maximum takeoff	lb	kg
Capacity
Powerplant
Engines	1 x Le Rhone rotary
Power	80 hp
Performance
Maximum speed	104 mph	167 km/h
Combat range
Service ceiling	17390 ft	5300 m
Rate of climb	15 min to 3,000 m (9,840 ft)
Wing loading
Power/Mass	0.09 hp/lb
Avionics
Avionics
Armament
Guns	1 Hotchkiss or Lewis machine gun

The Nieuport 11 was designed in response to the Fokker Scourge of 1915. Anthony Fokker's Eindecker aircraft were handing air superiority to the Central Powers, making Allied aerial observation very difficult.

Gustave Delage's answer to the Fokker menace was a scaled down version of the Nieuport 10 fighter. 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.

A sesquiplane is an aircraft with a full-sized top wing borne upon two wing spars, while the lower wing was of a much smaller chord and built around only one spar. Despite the "Vee-strut" stabilizing, it tended to twist and bend under very high stress. The airplane was controlled by ailerons, compared to the Fokker's obsolete wing-warping technology.

The Fokker Eindecker's main advantage in combat was that the armament was synchronized to fire through the aircraft's propeller. While at the time, the Allies did not possess a similar gun system, the Nie 11's 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 but with the difficulty to refill the magazine of 27 cartridges.

The plane was utilized in World War I. 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.)

Some Nie 11's were modified to fire rockets from the struts.