In 1933 took to the air an experimental plane that reputedly
contributed to raise French fashion design to even higher standards.
The apocryphal story goes that instead of aeronautic engineers the Farman company hired French fashion designers. After much discussion and sounds of busy scissors, the patterns for a plane emerged.
The plane made use of an adapted Farman series 400 fuselage to which a semi-circular wing of large area was attached. One can only image the discussion between the control surfaces about which will have top control what. Nevertheless the plane flew, and flew well, in-spite of the pilot reputedly having to deal with an abundance of levers protruding from every conceivable corner of the cockpit.
The model:
This is a rather simple rendition. You have the in-process images to get the idea, so I won’t have to bore you with meticulous and useless descriptions. Besides using the normal modeling paraphernalia, this time I chopped a few cylinders from an Engine & Things product to complete the engine.
Prop is carved from a popsicle wood stick and the boss is a photo-etched part.
For those of us with a bias toward the unusual, this is one that ranks high in the list; simple enough to avoid much head-scratching and good looking enough to spark the construction flame.
The apocryphal story goes that instead of aeronautic engineers the Farman company hired French fashion designers. After much discussion and sounds of busy scissors, the patterns for a plane emerged.
The plane made use of an adapted Farman series 400 fuselage to which a semi-circular wing of large area was attached. One can only image the discussion between the control surfaces about which will have top control what. Nevertheless the plane flew, and flew well, in-spite of the pilot reputedly having to deal with an abundance of levers protruding from every conceivable corner of the cockpit.
The model:
This is a rather simple rendition. You have the in-process images to get the idea, so I won’t have to bore you with meticulous and useless descriptions. Besides using the normal modeling paraphernalia, this time I chopped a few cylinders from an Engine & Things product to complete the engine.
Prop is carved from a popsicle wood stick and the boss is a photo-etched part.
For those of us with a bias toward the unusual, this is one that ranks high in the list; simple enough to avoid much head-scratching and good looking enough to spark the construction flame.
Haute -flying- couture!
edit:
ReplyDeleteThis is not quite so strange if you look also at the Arup S-2 and S-4, and the very similar Nemeth "paraplane", all of which flew well, if ignored by markets and potential buyers.
They and others like the Canova rhomboidal-wing series and Payen AP-10 and others were of a spate of designs around the early '30s into low-aspect ratio planes for STOL performance. Most others were all-wing -with no fuselage or horizontal tail, all were quite small. Fauvel AV-10 also loosely fits in this category.
This might be the largest of the very low aspect-ratio planes to have flown. Possibly larger than the dual control Arup S-4 and the Nemeth.
Hi John
DeleteYou will fin the Arups, the Nemeth, the Canova, and many other low aspect ratio 1/72 models on this blog.