The Potez 230 was a French lightweight single-seat, single-engined
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 ...
. One prototype was built and flew in 1940, but no production followed, with the prototype being captured and shipped to Germany for study.
Design and development
In 1936,
ANF Les Mureaux designed and flew the
ANF Les Mureaux 190, a lightweight single-engined fighter aircraft powered by a
ANF Les Mureaux 190 engine and with a fixed undercarriage. The unreliability of the engine caused the 190 to be abandoned in 1937.
[Green and Swanborough 1994, p. 19.] Despite this setback, and the nationalisation of ANF Les Mureaux to form part of the state-owned
SNCAN combine, the former design team of Les Mureaux, René Lemaitre and Hubert led by André Brunet, did not abandon the concept of lightweight fighters, and in 1938, began work on the Potez 230, a more advanced development of the Les Mureaux 190.
[Green 1960, p. 60.][Green and Swanborough 1994, pp. 482–483.]
Like the earlier aircraft, the Potez 230 was a low-wing
cantilever
A cantilever is a rigid structural element that extends horizontally and is supported at only one end. Typically it extends from a flat vertical surface such as a wall, to which it must be firmly attached. Like other structural elements, a canti ...
monoplane
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 confi ...
, with a similar
elliptical wing. The wings were built around an integral
torsion box
A torsion box consists of Sandwich theory, two thin layers of material (skins) on either side of a lightweight core, usually a grid of beams. It is designed to resist Torsion (mechanics), torsion under an applied load. A hollow core door is probabl ...
, the first example of this structure to have flown, and were fitted with split trailing-edge
flaps. The aircraft's
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 ...
was of oval cross-section, with the pilot accommodated in an enclosed cockpit. The aircraft was powered by a
Hispano-Suiza 12X
The Hispano-Suiza 12X was an aircraft piston engine designed in France by Hispano-Suiza during the early 1930s. A 12-cylinder Vee, liquid-cooled design, the 12X was used on several aircraft types, some of them being used in limited numbers durin ...
crs
V12 engine
A V12 engine is a twelve-cylinder piston engine where two banks of six cylinders are arranged in a V configuration around a common crankshaft. V12 engines are more common than V10 engines. However, they are less common than V8 engines.
The fi ...
driving a three-bladed
Ratier propeller in a
tractor configuration. Armament was planned to be a single Hispano-Suiza 20 mm cannon mounted between the engine cylinder banks and firing through the propeller, with four 7.5 mm machine guns to be mounted in the wings.
[Green 1960, pp. 60–61.]
The unarmed prototype made its maiden flight at
Villacoublay on 30 March 1940.
Testing was relatively trouble-free, with the aircraft reaching a speed of at sea level and at , with it being planned to fit a more powerful
Hispano-Suiza 12Y engine. The
German invasion of France disrupted testing, however, with the prototype captured by the Germans when they seized Villacoublay airfield in June 1940. The Germans were interested in the novel wing torsion box, and the prototype, together with all available drawings and data, was shipped to Germany for closer study.
Specifications
See also
Notes
References
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External links
Aviafrance
{{Potez aircraft
World War II French fighter aircraft
1940s French fighter aircraft
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