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The Deperdussin Seagull was a seaplane developed by the British Deperdussin Company which was the English subsidiary of French company
Société Pour les Appareils Deperdussin
Lactalis is a French multinational dairy products corporation, owned by the Besnier family and based in Laval, Mayenne, France. The company's former name was Besnier SA.
Lactalis is the largest dairy products group in the world, and is the sec ...
.
Design and development
In early 1912,Frederick Koolhoven
Frederick (Frits) Koolhoven (11 January 1886 – 1 July 1946) was an aircraft designer in Britain and his native Netherlands.
Koolhoven was born in Bloemendaal, Netherlands. After training as an engineer in Liège and Antwerp, he worked from 19 ...
was hired by Deperdussin and joined the staff of Louis Bechereau, the designer of the various Deperdussin monocoque
Monocoque ( ), also called structural skin, is a structural system in which loads are supported by an object's external skin, in a manner similar to an egg shell. The word ''monocoque'' is a French term for "single shell".
First used for boats, ...
aircraft. By the summer of 1912, he had been promoted and sent to England to oversee the design and development of the British Deperdussin Company aircraft.
The Seagull was a tractor monoplane with a monocoque fuselage construction. Instead of using wires and turnbuckles to brace the wings, which was the common practice of the time, the Seagull's wings were braced with a truss that traveled under the fuselage from wingtip to wingtip. The designers claimed that this arrangement was no heavier than the typical wire bracing and it offered better rigidity to the wings
The wings were covered in a fabric that was designed to contain any damage caused by bullet holes. The fabric was reinforced by bunches of strong threads run through the material at right angles to form squares. If damage was done to a square, the threads would prevent the damage from leaving the square.
Lateral control was achieved with wing warping
Wing warping was an early system for lateral (roll) control of a fixed-wing aircraft. The technique, used and patented by the Wright brothers, consisted of a system of pulleys and cables to twist the trailing edges of the wings in opposite direc ...
and a movable rudder attached to the trailing edge of the vertical fin. A movable elevator attached to the trailing edge of the horizontal stabilizer was used for pitch control.
The landing gear consisted of a short, wide main float with two teardrop shaped floats attached to the tips of the wing truss. The tail float was aerodynamically shaped to provide lift to offset the weight of the float.
Operational history
The Seagull was developed as a competitor for anAdmiralty
Admiralty most often refers to:
*Admiralty, Hong Kong
*Admiralty (United Kingdom), military department in command of the Royal Navy from 1707 to 1964
*The rank of admiral
*Admiralty law
Admiralty can also refer to:
Buildings
* Admiralty, Traf ...
requirement for a reconnaissance seaplane. The Admiralty ordered two, but the poor performance of the prototype led to the cancellation of the order. This, combined with the War Office
The War Office was a department of the British Government responsible for the administration of the British Army between 1857 and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the new Ministry of Defence (MoD). This article contains text from ...
's ban on monoplanes, spelled the end for the further development of the Seagull.
Specifications (Seagull)
See also
*John Cyril Porte
Lieutenant Colonel John Cyril Porte, (26 February 1884 – 22 October 1919) was a British flying boat pioneer associated with the First World War Seaplane Experimental Station at Felixstowe.
Early life and career
Porte was born on 26 Feb ...
References
{{Deperdussin aircraft Seagull SPAD aircraft Mid-wing aircraft Single-engined tractor aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1913