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Aviation History
1954
1954 - 0021.PDF
1 January 1954 11 A Pup with a rigid skid undercarriage. (Below) Beardmore S.B.3D with wings and undercarriage extended. a flight, and thought was given to the question of landing on the flight decks of ships at sea. Experiments were carried out in the Furious, and it is doubtful whether any other aeroplane but the Pup could have been used in them. The Furious had the conventional ship's superstructure, and the 228ft flying deck lay ahead of it. To land-on, therefore, it was necessary to fly past the superstructure and then to get over the deck as quickly •as possible. Preliminary trial flights made with the ship in harbour showed that this could be done in a Pup, and the first landing was carried out by S/Cdr. E. H. Dunning on August 2nd, 1917. His Pup was fitted with rope toggles at the wing tips and under the fuselage, and by these the machine was pulled down to the deck manually as soon as Dunning had crabbed in over the deck centre line. This gallant officer repeated this feat successfully but was killed in a third attempt on August 7th. Later, in March, 1918, the Furious was fitted with an after deck, 284ft x 70ft, for landing-on, and arrester gears were intro duced. While Furious was in course of being modified, S/Cdr. Busteed had been experimenting with various experimental forms of arrester gear at Port Victoria. Once again the Pup was the aircraft selected for these trials, and it was ultimately found possible to bring a Pup to rest after a run of only fifty feet, using a system of transverse cables attached at each end to sandbags, and engaged by a hook on the aircraft. The wheel undercarriage of the Pup was not too satisfactory in actual landing-on, how ever, for the machine's low landing speed placed it at the mercy of oblique gusts and the roll of the ship. Accidents occurred in which tyres were rolled off the wheels, and experiments were forthwith made with undercarriages in which the wheels were replaced by wooden skids. At first, the skid undercarriage retained the rubber shock-cord springing, but this was later discarded and the whole struc ture was made rigid. Strangely enough, the skid-fitted Pups could take off from any normal grass aerodrome just as easily as the standard machines, the landing run was appreciably reduced, and the general performance was slightly improved. These Pups with skid undercarriages were used in the Furious, and the form of arrester gear used in that ship consisted of longi tudinal cables which were engaged by special clips on the air craft's undercarriage. The problem of conservation of space on board ship also received attention once aircraft carriers had been accepted as workable propositions. Folding wines were not new in 1918, having been used on many types of Short seaplanes, the Fairey F.2, and the Handley Page 0/100 and 0/400, to mention only a few examples. A specially modified version of the Pup was produced by William Beardmore and Co., and had not only folding wings but a folding undercarriage as well. This machine had the Beardmore type number W.B.III, but was officially known as S.B.3D. It was produced in quantity: on October 31st, 1918, 37 S.B.3Ds were with the Grand Fleet and 18 were in store. The modifications to the basic design were somewhat drastic. The fuselage was lengthened by about a foot, and the mainplanes were rigged with reduced dihedral and without stagger. This meant that the lower wing was further forward and the upper wing further aft than on the Pup. The mainplanes were hinged at the rear spar, and additional interplane struts were inserted at their inboard ends to preserve the truss with the wings folded. The centre section struts of the normal Pup were replaced by four full-length interplane struts connecting upper and lower centre sections: these struts were joined to the upper longerons by short transverse struts. On the protoype S.B.3D, No. 9950, the ailerons were operated by control rods in a similar fashion to those of the Nieuport Scout, and the control surfaces were connected by a rod. On production machines, however, some form of the more usual cable system of operation seems to have been used, and the ailerons were connected by a cable. Span and wing area were reduced because of the smaller centre section, and the loaded weight was slightly lower than that of the Pup. The undercarriage was an ingenious structure. It was a normal vee type when extended, but could be folded very neatly into die bottom of the fuselage, leaving half of each wheel protruding, and could also be jettisoned completely if the areoplane had to alight on the water. Emergency flotation gear was fitted as standard equipment. Despite the radical modifications to the basic design, the speed of the S.B.3D was litde below that of the Pup, but its rate of climb was considerably reduced. The type was used in H.M.S. Furious, the maximum number carried being fourteen, but there is no record of any action in which S.B.3Ds took part. Strange as it may seem, a note in the 1920 edition of Jane's All the World's Aircraft indicates that in that year Japan had some S.B.3D machines on the strength of her Naval Air Service. It seems that some form of the Pup was built in Japan in small numbers, but whether the Japanese-built machines were true Pups or S.B.3Ds is uncertain. The armament of the shipboard Pups usually consisted of a single Lewis gun mounted on a tripod immediately in front of the cockpit. An aperture was provided in the centre section, and the gun could fire either upwards and forwards over the airscrew or almost vertically upwards. Other R.N.A.S. Pups had the standard armament of one synchronised Vickers gun, and experi ments were carried out with Le Prieur rockets. Eight were carried, four on each pair of interplane struts. Production continued right up to the Armistice: indeed, the greatest output of Pups was achieved in the first quarter of 1918, in which period 500 were built. Since the Pup had been derived from Hawker's Runabout of 1915 it was fitting that from the Pup should be derived Hawker's next personal aeroplane. This was the diminutive Bee, which, powered by a 50 h.p. Gnome and with a span of only 16ft 3in, embodied a number of Pup components. The Sopwith Sparrow radio-controlled biplane also owed something to the Pup; so (but to a lesser extent) did Britain's first radio-controlled aeroplane, a litde monoplane built in 1916 for Professor A. M. Low's experi ments: its mainplanes were the lower wings of a Pup. After its withdrawal from squadron service at the end of 1917, the Pup was widely used by Training Squadrons, and was eagerly sought after by senior officers for their personal use. At the Gosport School of Special Flying there was at one time a Pup which was painted all over in black and white stripes: It was flown by Captain Foote. Individualistic markings were characteristic of the Pup, and it was the last British type to carry pilot's personal markings in squadron service. To the end it remained a pilot's aeroplane in every respect. A number of Pups survived the Armistice, but only a handful went on the British Civil Register. The basic design was developed into a litde two-seater, known as the Dove, which was produced in some numbers in 1919. All the Doves save one had slighdy swept-back wings of only 25ft span. The straight-wing Dove, registered G-EBKY, was rebuilt to resemble a Pup by Warden Aviation, Ltd., in 1936, and is still flying today, wearing the serial number N.5180. This machine differs from the true Pup design in several ways, however, and is not a wholly accurate reproduction of the original Pup N.5180. Per haps the last genuine Pup was the one reported to be at Geelong West, Australia, in 1937. Whatever praise may be righdy given to the many good aero planes which fought and flew during the first World War, the Sopwith Pup occupies a unique place in our aircraft history as the flying machine in which were combined the maximum number of virtues. Obedience, agility and tractability were among its most desirable characteristics, and above all it possessed
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