The Avro 534 Baby (originally named the "Popular") was a British single-seat light sporting

biplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While ...

built shortly after the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

Development

The Avro Baby was a single-bay biplane of conventional configuration with a wire-braced wooden structure covered in canvas. It had equal-span, unstaggered wings which each carried two pairs of

aileron An aileron (French for "little wing" or "fin") is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Ailerons are used in pairs to control the aircraft in roll (or movement around ...

s. Initially, the aircraft was finless and had a

rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (generally aircraft, air or watercraft, water). On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to ...

of almost circular shape. There were later variations of this. The main undercarriage was a single-axle arrangement and with a tailskid. The first Babies were powered by a water-cooled inline

Green C.4 The Green C.4 was a British four-cylinder, water-cooled aero engine that first ran in 1908, it was designed by Gustavus Green and built by the Green Engine Co and Aster Engineering. The engine was one of two Green designs to win a government ...

engine of pre-1914 design that had previously been installed in the

Avro Type D The Avro Type D was an aircraft built in 1911 by the pioneer British aircraft designer A.V. Roe. Roe had previously built and flown several aircraft at Brooklands, most being tractor layout triplanes. The Type D was his first biplane. Design ...

, though thoroughly remodelled postwar by the Green Engine Co. Ltd.Jackson 1990, p. 165. It produced 35 hp (26 kW). Most of the later Babies also used this engine design, new-built from original Green drawings by Peter Brotherhood Limited of

Peterborough Peterborough () is a cathedral city in Cambridgeshire, east of England. It is the largest part of the City of Peterborough unitary authority district (which covers a larger area than Peterborough itself). It was part of Northamptonshire until ...

, though some variants used either a 60 hp (45 kW)

ADC Cirrus 1 The ADC Cirrus is a series of British aero engines manufactured using surplus Renault parts by the Aircraft Disposal Company (ADC) in the 1920s. The engines were air-cooled, four-cylinder inline types. They were widely used for private and li ...

or an 80 hp (60 kW) le Rhone. These new-build Greens were about 6 lb (3 kg) lighter. The prototype first flew on 30 April 1919 from Avro's Hamble airfield. It crashed on the nearby foreshore two minutes into the flight due to pilot error. The second prototype flew successfully on 31 May 1919. The type 534A Water Baby was a

floatplane A floatplane is a type of seaplane with one or more slender floats mounted under the fuselage to provide buoyancy. By contrast, a flying boat uses its fuselage for buoyancy. Either type of seaplane may also have landing gear suitable for land, ...

version with an altered rudder and large fin. The fourth (counting the short-lived prototype) Baby was designated Type 534B, distinguished by its

plywood Plywood is a material manufactured from thin layers or "plies" of wood veneer that are glued together with adjacent layers having their wood grain rotated up to 90 degrees to one another. It is an engineered wood from the family of manufactured ...

-covered fuselage and reduced-span lower wing. The Type 534C had both wings clipped for racing in the 1921

Aerial Derby The Aerial Derby was an air race in the United Kingdom sponsored by the '' Daily Mail'' in which the competitors flew a circuit around London. It was first held in 1912, with subsequent races in 1913 and 1914. Suspended during the First World Wa ...

. The 534D was a Baby modified for hot climates and was used by a businessman in India. All 534s were Green-engined single-seaters. The Type 543 Baby was a two-seater with a 2 ft 6 in (76 cm) fuselage extension. It too was initially Green-powered, but in 1926, this was replaced by an 80 hp (60 kW) ADC Cirrus 1 air-cooled upright inline engine. Avro_554_Antarctic_Baby_L'Aerophile_February,1922

Avro_554_Antarctic_Baby_L'Aerophile_February,1922

The final version of the Baby was the type 554 Antarctic Baby, built as photographic aircraft for the 1921–1922 Shackleton-Rowett Expedition to Antarctica. This had an 80 hp (60 kW) le Rhone engine, raised

tailplane A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabiliser, is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyroplane ...

s, rounded wingtips and tubular steel struts replacing rigging wires to avoid the problems of tensioning rigging wires with gloved hands. Like the Water Baby, it was a floatplane. By far the strangest Baby was one modified by H.G. Leigh in 1920. The original wings were removed and instead the aircraft had a short, conventional, shoulder-mounted wing, bearing projecting, full-span ailerons. Above it was a strongly forward-staggered stack of six very narrow-chord wings of about the same span as the lower wing, hence each of very high aspect ratio and therefore with low induced drag. This complicated structure added about 60 lb (30 kg) to the weight. This "Venetian blind" wing design was proposed and previously explored by Horatio Phillips in the last decade of the 19th century.Taylor 1955, image 49.

Operational history

The Babies were raced in the early 1920s by a variety of pilots but are best remembered for the flights of ''G-EACQ'' in the hands of Bert Hinkler. On 31 May 1920 he made a non-stop flight from

Croydon Croydon is a large town in south London, England, south of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Croydon, a local government district of Greater London. It is one of the largest commercial districts in Greater London, with an extensi ...

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese language, Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital ...

in 9 hours 30 minutes – a flight of 655 mi (1,050 km) and celebrated at the time as "the most meritorious flight on record". On 24 July, he won second place in the handicap category of the

Hendon Hendon is an urban area in the Borough of Barnet, North-West London northwest of Charing Cross. Hendon was an ancient manor and parish in the county of Middlesex and a former borough, the Municipal Borough of Hendon; it has been part of Great ...

, and on 11 April 1921 set a new distance record in Australia when he flew the Baby non-stop from Sydney to his home town of

Bundaberg Bundaberg is a city in the Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia, and is the tenth largest city in the state. Bundaberg's regional area has a population of 70,921, and is a major centre of the Wide Bay–Burnett geographical region. The Bun ...

800 mi (1,288 km) away, making the flight in 8 hours 40 minutes. Hinkler's Baby is preserved at the

Hinkler Hall of Aviation The Hinkler Hall of Aviation is an air museum in Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia focused on the legacy of Australian aviator Bert Hinkler. The museum opened in 2008 alongside the Hinkler House, and was designed to accommodate up to 34,000 vis ...

. In June 1922, another Baby made the first flight between London and Moscow when the Russian Gwaiter collected his machine from Hamble and flew it home. The Antarctic Baby (or most of it) accompanied

Ernest Shackleton Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of ...

on his final expedition to the Antarctic. Unfortunately, their ship, the ''Quest'', delayed by engine trouble was not able to pick up the missing parts previously transported to

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...

and the Avro was not used at the Pole.

Specifications (534 Baby, post-war Green engine)

Avro_Baby_3-view_Les_Ailes_September_1,_1921

References

Bibliography

* Jackson, A.J. ''Avro Aircraft since 1908''. London: Putnam Aeronautical Books 2nd edition, 1990. . * * Taylor, John W. R. ''A Picture History of Flight''. London: Hulton Press, 1955. * Taylor, Michael J. H. ''Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation. London: Studio Editions, 1989. .

Development

Operational history

Specifications (534 Baby, post-war Green engine)

References

Bibliography

Further reading