The Régnier 12 was a 1930s Belgian touring aircraft offering variants with different engines and seating plans. Only one was built.

Design

Carlos Régnier (no relation of the aircraft engine builder) intended that his low wing monoplane would be capable of carrying two, three or four people, using a variety of engines with powers in the range . The prototype and only example built was a side-by-side two-seater. The Régnier 12's wing was in three parts with a short span, rectangular plan centre section and almost triangular plan outer panels, strongly tapered with a tip angle of about 20°. The outer panels had a dihedral of 4.5°. The wing was built around two wooden box spars; its

rib In vertebrate anatomy, ribs ( la, costae) are the long curved bones which form the rib cage, part of the axial skeleton. In most tetrapods, ribs surround the chest, enabling the lungs to expand and thus facilitate breathing by expanding the ches ...

s were also wooden and the skin was birch

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 ...

. Long

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 filled much of the outer panels' trailing edges. Like the wings the fuselage was wooden, with four

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 defining its flat-sided form; it, too, had stressed birch ply skin. A

Train 4T The Train 2T, 4T and 6T were low power piston engines for light aircraft, produced in France. They were inverted, air-cooled in-line engines with the same bore and stroke, differing chiefly in the number of cylinders. Design and development In ...

four-cylinder, air-cooled, inverted

straight engine The straight or inline engine is an internal combustion engine with all cylinders aligned in one row and having no offset. Usually found in four, six and eight cylinder configurations, they have been used in automobiles, locomotives and aircraft ...

drove a two-blade

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 ...

. The two occupants sat side by side in an open

cockpit A cockpit or flight deck is the area, usually near the front of an aircraft or spacecraft, from which a Pilot in command, pilot controls the aircraft. The cockpit of an aircraft contains flight instruments on an instrument panel, and the ...

, fitted with dual control, over the wing. Its empennage was conventional, with a horizontal tail mounted on top of the fuselage and strongly straight-tapered like the wing. The elevators were inset and separate, with a gap between them to allow the movement of a deep,

balanced rudder Balanced rudders are used by both ships and aircraft. Both may indicate a portion of the rudder surface ahead of the hinge, placed to lower the control loads needed to turn the rudder. For aircraft the method can also be applied to elevators and ...

mounted on a small fin. The construction of the rear surfaces was similar to that of the wings. The Régnier 12 had a wide track, conventional

undercarriage Undercarriage is the part of a moving vehicle that is underneath the main body of the vehicle. The term originally applied to this part of a horse-drawn carriage, and usage has since broadened to include: *The landing gear of an aircraft. *The ch ...

. Each mainwheel was at the end of a vertical oleo strut mounted on the forward wing spar, together with a rearward drag strut to the lower fuselage longeron. Its steel tailskid had two coil springs.

Development

The Régnier 12 was registered as ''OO-REG'' on 8 August 1936; the date of its first flight is not known, though tests with an unknown type of engine had started before May 1937. It appears that the Train engine was fitted by the time of the 1st Brussels Aero Salon in late May 1937. By July 1937 it had been flown solo by its designer, a pilot with only ten hours experience.

Specifications (Train 4T)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Regnier 12 1930s Belgian sport aircraft Low-wing aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1936 Single-engined tractor aircraft