The Dewoitine D.25 was a single-engine, two-seat,

parasol-wing A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single mainplane, in contrast to a biplane or other types of multiplanes, which have multiple planes. A monoplane has inherently the highest efficiency and lowest drag of any wing con ...

fighter aircraft Fighter aircraft are fixed-wing military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat. In military conflict, the role of fighter aircraft is to establish air superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the airspace above a battlefield ...

built in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

in the 1920s. The 1925 French two-seat fighter programme was cancelled before any orders were placed, but four examples were exported to

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

Design and development

The D.25 was a

tandem Tandem, or in tandem, is an arrangement in which a team of machines, animals or people are lined up one behind another, all facing in the same direction. The original use of the term in English was in ''tandem harness'', which is used for two ...

two-seat version of the

Dewoitine D.21 __NOTOC__ The Dewoitine D.21 was 1920s French open-cockpit, fixed- undercarriage monoplane fighter aircraft. Design and development The prototype D.21 was a development of the D.12. The aircraft was license-built in Switzerland (by EKW), Cz ...

single-seat, parasol-wing fighter, developed to the 1925 C2 (2 seat Chasseur or fighter) programme from the Section Technique de l'Aéronautique (Technical Section of Aeronautics, STAé) for an aircraft capable of daytime and nighttime fighter duty and daytime reconnaissance. The chief structural difference between the two models, which shared the same span and length, was the D.25's second cockpit itself and the

fuselage The fuselage (; from the French ''fuselé'' "spindle-shaped") is an aircraft's main body section. It holds crew, passengers, or cargo. In single-engine aircraft, it will usually contain an engine as well, although in some amphibious aircraft t ...

strengthening around it to allow a gun mounting. Though the two-seater was heavier, it had a less powerful engine: it used a

Lorraine-Dietrich 12E The Lorraine 12E Courlis was a W-12 (broad arrow) aero engine produced by the French company Lorraine-Dietrich during the 1920s and 1930s. Variants ;12E: ;12Eb: ;12Ebr: ;12Ed: ;12Edr: ;12Ee: ;12Ew:The standard Eb fitted with a supplementary s ...

b water-cooled upright W-12 instead of the similarly arranged

Hispano-Suiza 12G Hispano-Suiza () is a Spanish automotive–engineering company. It was founded in 1904 by Marc Birkigt and Damian Mateu as an automobile manufacturer and eventually had several factories in Spain and France that produced luxury cars, aircraft en ...

b. Both the D.21 and D.25 had much in common with the Dewoitine D.12 of 1924. For example, the D.25's parasol wing was similar to that of the D.12, with the same span, a constant chord inner panel, outer sections tapered on both the

leading In typography, leading ( ) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies. In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to incre ...

and

trailing edge The trailing edge of an aerodynamic surface such as a wing is its rear edge, where the airflow separated by the leading edge meets.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, third edition'', page 521. Aviation Supplies & Academics, 1997. ...

s but chiefly on the latter, ending in blunt tips. It was braced to the lower fuselage by a parallel pair of long struts on each side. The D.12 and D.25 used the same Lorraine-Dietrich engine with a circular nose-mounted

radiator Radiators are heat exchangers used to transfer thermal energy from one medium to another for the purpose of cooling and heating. The majority of radiators are constructed to function in cars, buildings, and electronics. A radiator is always a ...

immediately behind the

propeller A propeller (colloquially often called a screw if on a ship or an airscrew if on an aircraft) is a device with a rotating hub and radiating blades that are set at a pitch to form a helical spiral which, when rotated, exerts linear thrust upon ...

. Flight testing of the D.25 began in 1926 but the STAé dropped the 1925 C2 programme. Dewoitine therefore sought to export it and in 1928 gained an order for four from

. These were armed with two pairs of fixed

Madsen machine gun The Madsen is a light machine gun that Julius A. Rasmussen and Theodor Schouboe designed and proposed for adoption by Colonel Vilhelm Herman Oluf Madsen, the Danish Minister of War, and that the Royal Danish Army adopted in 1902. It was the wor ...

s, one fixed and fitted with

synchronisation Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchrono ...

, firing forward through the propeller arc, and the other on a gun mounting in the rear cockpit. The construction of these machines was sub-contracted to the

Hanriot Aéroplanes Hanriot et Cie. or simply 'Hanriot' was a French aircraft manufacturer with roots going back to the beginning of aviation. Founded by René Hanriot in 1910 as ''The Monoplans Hanriot Company Ltd.'' the company survived in different ...

aircraft company.

Operators

; * Army Aviation Service

Specifications

References

{{Dewoitine aircraft Single-engined tractor aircraft Parasol-wing aircraft 1920s French fighter aircraft D.25 Aircraft first flown in 1926