Tony Holmes - Plane Spotters Guide

Crew: Pilot

Length: 19ft 3.75in (5.89m)

Wingspan: 26ft 6in (8.08m)

Height: 9ft 5in (2.87m)

Empty: 787lb (357kg)

Max T/O: 1,225lb (556kg)

Max Speed: 111mph (179km/h)

Range: endurance of 3 hours

Powerplant: Le Rhne 9C

Output: 80hp (59.6kW)

Armament: One fixed Vickers 0.303in machine gun forward of cockpit; anti-airship armament of four Le Prieur rockets, two per interplane struts

First Flight Date: February 1916

Joe Fall was joint leading scorer with the Pup, and he claimed three victories with N6205 on 23 and 29 April and 1 May 1917. He had the name BETTY painted on the fighters fuselage, and the aircraft also featured a red cowling and wheel covers. This C Flight machine was damaged on 11 May 1917 and following repairs it served in England. Later still it became 9901 and was assigned as a ships Pup.

Pup B1777 of Capt A. S. G. Lee, No 46 Sqn, Suttons Farm, Essex, August 1917

The colourful markings of this Pup were applied while the squadron was based at Suttons Farm, Essex, in JulyAugust 1917 during one of the Gotha bomber scares. Arthur Gould Lee had the name CHIN-CHOW painted beneath the cockpit as a reference to a character in a popular London west-end show of the time. His personal markings were removed after No 46 Sqn returned to France on 30 August. Lee scored five victories with B1777 between 4 and 30 September 1917.

T he highly successful Nieuport family of fighters were unique in their adoption of the sesquiplane wing layout, which saw them use the same wing design as a biplane, but with the lower wing possessing less than half the area of the upper flying surface. Supported by unique V-shaped interplane struts, the Gustave Delage-designed Nieuports were amongst the lightest and most manoeuvrable scouts of World War I thanks to the sesquiplane layout.

Tracing its lineage directly back to the revolutionary Nieuport 11 Bb of early 1916, the Nieuport 17 proved to be an outstanding success, despite suffering more than its fair share of wing shedding. The most successful of all sesquiplane fighters thanks to its greater wing area and structural refinements, the 17 equipped every French escadrille de chasse at some point during 1916. The RFC also purchased the 17 in significant numbers, examples reaching its units in France from July 1916. The Belgian, Italian and Russian air arms also made widespread use of the 17, having operated earlier Nieuport scouts. The standard 17 enjoyed almost a year of unparalleled success in combat, effectively ending the Fokker Eindecker scourge over the Western Front.

In an effort to keep the machine competitive in combat, Nieuport produced the 17bis in late 1916, this version featuring a 130hp Clerget 9B engine in place of the 110/120hp Le Rhne 9Ja/Jb that had powered the standard 17. The aircraft also boasted full-length fuselage side fairings. These modifications did very little to improve the scouts overall performance, however, and only a small number of 17bis were delivered to the French and the RNAS.

The follow-on Nieuport 23 and 24 were scarcely distinguishable from the 17, and none could match the speed and rate of climb of the SPAD series of French fighters. Nevertheless, the sesquiplanes remained in production until the end of World War I, by which time production of all Le Rhne-engined Nieuports had exceeded 7,200 aircraft.

Nieuport 17 A213 of Capt A. Ball, No 60 Sqn, Savy, France, September 1916