The Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.1 was designed and built in 1910 by the pioneer designer Geoffrey de Havilland. He used it to teach himself to fly during late 1910. After De Havilland was appointed assistant designer and test pilot at the Army Balloon Factory at
Farnborough Farnborough may refer to:
Australia
* Farnborough, Queensland, a locality in the Shire of Livingstone
United Kingdom
* Farnborough, Hampshire, a town in the Rushmoor district of Hampshire, England
** Farnborough (Main) railway station, a railw ...
(later the Royal Aircraft Factory) in December 1910 the War Office bought the aircraft for £400. the aircraft was given the designation F.E.1 (''Farman Experimental'')
Design and development
After the failure of his first aircraft design Geoffrey de Havilland began construction of his second aircraft, re-using the engine that he had designed for the earlier machine.
Like the Bristol Boxkite and several other contemporary British designs, this closely followed the general lines of the
Farman III
The Farman III, also known as the Henry Farman 1909 biplane, was an early French aircraft designed and built by Henry Farmanpusher biplane with an elevator carried on booms in front of the wing, the pilot seated on the lower wing directly in front of the engine, and a second elevator and a rudder behind the wings. Lateral control was effected by a pair 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 mounted on the upper wing. De Havilland and several other pilots flew it at Farnborough until it crashed in the summer of 1911 while piloted by Lt. Theodore J. Ridge, who was later killed flying the S.E.1.
"Rebuild" as the F.E.2
The crashed F.E.1 was "rebuilt" in August 1911 as the F.E.2. In fact it was a "rebuild" in name only, as it was a completely new design, incorporating few if any actual components of the original (at this stage Farnborough were still not authorised to build aircraft from scratch). The Iris engine, seriously damaged in the F.E.1 crash, was replaced by a 50 hp.
Gnome
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
rotary engine, a two-seater nacelle was fitted, and the fore-elevator was replaced with one incorporated into a
sesquiplane
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 a ...
tail in the conventional manner. In this form many tests were carried out, including the fitting of a
Maxim machine gun
The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun invented in 1884 by Hiram Stevens Maxim. It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world.
The Maxim gun has been called "the weapon most associated with imperial conquest" by historian M ...
, and seaplane trials, it being fitted with a single central float. At this point the F.E.2 was powered by a 70 hp (52 kW) Gnome.
In 1913 the F.E.2 design was once more heavily reworked with a new and streamlined nacelle, upper wing panels which extended the span to 42 ft (12.08 m) and a revised tail with a smaller rudder and tailplane lifted to the top
longeron
In engineering, a longeron and stringer is the load-bearing component of a framework.
The term is commonly used in connection with aircraft fuselages and automobile chassis. Longerons are used in conjunction with stringers to form structural ...
s. The nacelle was by now deeper and more spacious, while the mainplanes were identical to those of the B.E.2a. The Gnome was replaced by a 70 hp (52 kW) air cooled Renault V-8 engine. Effectively, although the factory now routinely constructed original aircraft, it was another case of a new design reusing the designation of an older one. It was lost in a crash near Wittering on 23 February 1914 when the pilot, R. Kemp lost control while in a dive, Kemp being unable to recover from the "steep spiral descent", killing his passenger. The rebuilt design had not had sufficient fin area to balance the area of the nacelle side.''Flight'' p724,
The F.E.2a/b/d types produced in numbers in World War I followed the same general layout, but were considerably larger, and again of totally new design. This double re-use of the F.E.2 designation has caused considerable confusion among aviation historians.
*Hare, Paul R. ''Aircraft of the Royal Aircraft Factory'' Ramsbury: The Crowood Prss, 1999
*
*Lewis, Peter ''British Aircraft 1809-1914'' London, Putnam, 1962
* O'Gorman, Mervyn "First Report on Aeroplane Research on Full-Sized Machines: Aeroplane F.E. 2" pp. 104–106 of ''Technical Report of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics for the Year 1911–12'', London: HMSO, 1919. Discusses the F.E.2 created by "rebuilding" the F.E.1.