DeHavilland Airco
DH-2 WWI Scout
After
evaluation at Hendon on 22 June 1915, the first Airco/DeHavilland
DH.2 arrived in France for operational trials with No.
5 RFC Squadron but was shot down and its pilot killed (although
the Airco DH.2 was recovered and repaired by
the Germans).
No. 24 Squadron RFC, the first squadron equipped with the Airco DH.2 and the first complete squadron entirely equipped with single-seat fighters in the RFC (or, incidentally, any other flying service), arrived in France in February 1916.
The DH.2 ultimately equipped six fighter squadrons. The little
pusher quickly proved itself more than a match for the Fokker
Eindecker, and was heavily engaged during the Battle of the Somme,
24 Squadron alone engaging in 774 combats and destroying 44 enemy
machines. The DH.2 had sensitive controls and at a time when service
training for pilots in the RFC was very poor it terrified some
pilots, who nicknamed it the "Spinning Incinerator",
but as familiarity with the type increased, it was recognised
as very manoeverable and relatively easy to fly.
The arrival at the front of more powerful German tractor biplane
fighters such as the Halberstadt D.II and the Albatros D.I, which
appeared in September 1916, meant that the DH.2 was outclassed
in turn. It remained in first line service in France, however,
until No. 24 and No. 32 Squadron RFC completed re-equipment with
Airco DH 5s in June 1917, and a few remained in service on the
Macedonian front until late autumn of that year. By this time
the type was totally obsolete as a fighter, although it was used
as an advanced trainer into 1918.
Distinguished pilots of the DH.2 included Victoria Cross winner
Lanoe Hawker (eight victories), who was the first commander of
No 24 Squadron and ace Alan Wilkinson (10 victories). The commander
of No 32 Squadron Lionel Rees won the Victora Cross flying the
D.H.2 for attacking a formation of 10 German two-seaters on 1
July 1916. German ace and tactician Oswald Boelcke was killed
during a dogfight with 24 Squadron D.H.2s, although it should
be noted that this was due to a collision with one of his own
wingmen.
DH.2s were progressively retired by war's end and no surviving airframes were retained. In 1970, Walter M. Redfern from Seattle, Washington built a replica DH.2 powered by a Kinner 125-150 hp engine and subsequently, Redfern sold plans to home builders. Currently a number of the DH.2 replicas are flying worldwide.
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At the end of 1915, the German Fokker EIII with its syncronized machine guns completely over ran the Airco DeHavelland DH-2 in the crowded skies over France. |
 Use
these photos that Dr John sent in to answer a few of your
placement and rigging questions. You can well imagine that
this Airco DH-2 model is not for the new cardmodeler and
also you should know that Dr John is one of the best cardmodelers
anywhere.. |
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Interesting Links:
About
the LeRhone engine
About
the Gnome rotary engine
Rotary
Engines in Aviation History
More about the
Airco DH-2 aircraft
The first prototype of the Airco De Havilland DH2 reached the front
on July 26, 1915, and immediately ran out of luck. On August 9,
the aircraft, piloted by Captain 11. Maxwell-Pike, disappeared behind
the German lines. The pilot had been wounded and the DH 2 was in
German hands. Right up to the end of the war experiments were made
with various engines, and for a short time, DH 2's were used experimentally
against Zeppelins. Though its fame was short-lived, it was still
in service until 1918.
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Similar solutions..The
Vickers company overcame the problem of firing a machine-gun
forward, on the Gunbus, by making the aircraft a two-seater
with a pusher engine and seating a gunner in the nose. This
made it easier on the pilot but also created a large, less
nimble fighter for the Allies |
| CAMOUFLAGE AND INSIGNIA With the outbreak of WWI, it became evident that the airplane had to be rendered less visible, both on land and in the sky. Up to this point, no one had really given much thought to an airplane's appearance, but now every nation had to face the problem of camouflage, oftentimes coming up with Q quite original solutions. The colors tended toward dark greens and browns for the top surfaces, light beigen and blues for the bottom. It was also necessary to be able to distinguish friend from foe, so each nation developed its own system of identification codes and insignia. The Allies used three concentric circles, their colors varying from country to country, while the Germans chose a white square framing a black cross, symbol of the Teutonic Knights. An important discovery was the optical effect crested by stripes of two or more colors, which served to 'dissolve' the plane's silhouette, a camouflage technique favored mostly by the French and the Germans. This evolved into even more sophisticated patterns of interlocking polygons of four or more different colors which were effective on both the top and bottom surfaces. |
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THE
ROTARY ENGINE By 1909 their Parisian factory,
the Societe des Moteurs Gnome, was producing the first of
which The result was an air-cooled
propulsion unit, compact and light, with a particuarly favorable
weight-to- The Germans, despite having developed several excellent inline engines over the years, turned to the rotary, the most famous of which was the Oberursel, more or less an exact copy of a French engine made by Le Rhone, a company that merged with Gnome in 1919. Over the course of their development, these engines grew' in power from 50 to nearly 200 horsepower by war's end. The most widely used configuration had nine cylinders. |
would
become a long series of ever more powerful engines that
dominated airplane manufacture throughout World War I. The
main architectural innovation of the rotary engine lay in
the mobility of the cylinders: only the crankshaft was bolted
down, while the crankcase end radially-arranged cylinders
rotated freely around it, thereby driving the propeller.
power
ratio ideal for machines that had to be, above all else,
lightweight and fast. Moreover, its elevated torque and
consequent gyroscopic effect gave the airplane exceptional
agility. The rotary engine inevitably became the
preferred means of propulsion for fighter planes end, given
the times, demand from all over Europe was soon soaring.