The S.E.C.A.T.-VI La Mouette or S.E.C.A.T. 60T La Mouette (french: The Seagull) was a French two seat tourer built shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

Design

SECAT (Société d'Etudes et de Construction d'Avions de Tourisme) were established in

Boulogne Boulogne-sur-Mer (; pcd, Boulonne-su-Mér; nl, Bonen; la, Gesoriacum or ''Bononia''), often called just Boulogne (, ), is a coastal city in Northern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department of Pas-de-Calais. Boulogne lies on the ...

in 1938. During that year they produced the Type VI, a low powered,

high 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 confi ...

cabin monoplane with side-by-side seating for two. Its one piece cantilever wing had

spruce A spruce is a tree of the genus ''Picea'' (), a genus of about 35 species of coniferous evergreen trees in the family Pinaceae, found in the northern temperate and boreal (taiga) regions of the Earth. ''Picea'' is the sole genus in the subfami ...

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 ...

box spars and

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 and was

okoumé ''Aucoumea klaineana'' (angouma, gaboon, or okoumé) is a tree in the family Burseraceae, native to equatorial west Africa in Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and Río Muni. It is a large hardwood tree growing to tall, rarely larger, with a ...

plywood covered. It was attached to the upper fuselage

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 at six points and had a centre section of constant

chord Chord may refer to: * Chord (music), an aggregate of musical pitches sounded simultaneously ** Guitar chord a chord played on a guitar, which has a particular tuning * Chord (geometry), a line segment joining two points on a curve * Chord ( ...

and thickness. Beyond, the wing thinned from its underside, creating positive dihedral and became semi-elliptical in plan. Long (, more than 60% of the half-span)

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, unusually mounted inboard and gently decreasing in chord outboard, produced an overall wing plan close to the ideal ellipse. Like the wing, the rectangular section fuselage had a wooden frame and was ply covered. It had a , six cylinder, inverted, air cooled,

Train 6T 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 I ...

inline engine in the nose, driving 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 ...

and fed from a tank in the wing. The two side-by-side seats, provided with dual control, were in an enclosed cabin under the wing leading edge with glazing ahead, in the two side doors sides and above, with a panel in the wing centre section. The fuselage tapered to the rear to a tall vertical tail which had a straight edged fin and a straight edged, round topped

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 ...

which reached down to the keel. The curved edged tailplane, mounted low on the fuselage, carried unbalanced elevators cut away centrally for rudder movement. Like the rest of the aircraft the empennage was wood framed and ply covered. La Mouette had a steel tube tailskid undercarriage with a track of . The mainwheels, enclosed by fairings were on a split axle from the fuselage centre, joined through rubber

shock absorber A shock absorber or damper is a mechanical or hydraulic device designed to absorb and damp shock impulses. It does this by converting the kinetic energy of the shock into another form of energy (typically heat) which is then dissipated. Most sh ...

s to faired-in V-struts from the lower fuselage longerons.

Development

The date of the first flight of the S.E.C.A.T. VI is not known. It first came to public attention in December 1938 with an attempt on the world distance record for aircraft with engines of less than capacity, which ended with a mechanical failure. It gained its Certificate of Airworthiness (CoA) in June 1939. By July, production of a series of five was under way, though it is not known how many were completed. Airframe no.2, initially registered ''F-W134'', became ''F-PAAM'' on receiving its CoA and survived the war. No. 3, ''F-PEAB'', was registered post-war as a SECAT S.4 La Mouette and the post-war SECAT S.5 was a development. Both the S.5 and the SECAT RG-75 were very similar to the S.4 apart from having Régnier 4D.2 engines.

Specifications

References

{{SECAT aircraft 1930s French civil aircraft SECAT aircraft High-wing aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1938