The Villiers II was a French two-seat fighter aircraft of the 1920s intended for operation from the

Aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a fleet, as it allows a ...

''Béarn'' of the

French Navy The French Navy (french: Marine nationale, lit=National Navy), informally , is the maritime arm of the French Armed Forces and one of the five military service branches of France. It is among the largest and most powerful naval forces in t ...

. It was a single-engined

tractor A tractor is an engineering vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort (or torque) at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery such as that used in agriculture, mining or construction. Most common ...

biplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While ...

with a waterproof hull in the form of a flying boat to allow the aircraft to be safely landed on water in an emergency. Two prototypes and 30 production aircraft were built, the type serving briefly with the French Navy, although never operated from an aircraft carrier.

Development and design

In 1924, the French aircraft manufacturer Ateliers d'Aviation François Villiers was formed at

Meudon Meudon () is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the département of Hauts-de-Seine. It is located from the center of Paris. The city is known for many historic monuments and some extraordinary trees. One of t ...

near Paris.Gunston 2005, p.484. One of its first designs was to meet a requirement of the French Navy for a two-seat shipboard fighter. Villier's design, the Villiers II was a single-engined

sesquiplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While a ...

(i.e. a

with the lower wing much smaller than the upper wing). Although of conventional

tractor configuration In aviation, the term tractor configuration refers to an aircraft constructed in the standard configuration with its engine mounted with the propeller in front of it so that the aircraft is "pulled" through the air. Oppositely, the pusher c ...

with the engine in the nose driving a two-bladed propeller, and a

tailwheel Conventional landing gear, or tailwheel-type landing gear, is an aircraft undercarriage consisting of two main wheels forward of the center of gravity and a small wheel or skid to support the tail.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms ...

undercarriage, in order to allow safe

ditching In aviation, a water landing is, in the broadest sense, an Landing, aircraft landing on a body of water. Seaplanes, such as floatplanes and flying boats, land on water as a normal operation. Ditching is a controlled emergency landing on the ...

in the event of an emergency, it had a number of unusual features, with the fuselage being watertight and in the form of a

flying boat A flying boat is a type of fixed-winged seaplane with a hull, allowing it to land on water. It differs from a floatplane in that a flying boat's fuselage is purpose-designed for floatation and contains a hull, while floatplanes rely on fusela ...

hull, and the undercarriage being jettisonable. Two prototypes were ordered, under the designation Vil 2AMC2 (''Avion Marin Chasse Biplace''), one powered by a 450 hp (338 kW)

Hispano-Suiza 12H 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 ...

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 ...

and the other with a similarly powered

Lorraine-Dietrich 12Eb 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 su ...

W12 engine A W12 engine is a twelve-cylinder piston engine where three banks of four cylinders are arranged in a W configuration around a common crankshaft. W12 engines with three banks of four cylinders were used by several aircraft engines from 1917 unti ...

. After evaluation by the Aéronautique Maritime in May 1925, an order for 30 Vil 2AMC2 to be powered by the Lorraine-Dietrich engine, (together with an order for 20 of the competing

Levasseur PL.5 __NOTOC__ The Levasseur PL.5 was a carrier-based fighter produced in France in the late 1920s, in response to the 1924 AMBC.2 (two seat carrier based fighter) specification issued by the ''Service Technique de l'Aéronautique'' (STAé). It was a ...

s) was placed on 19 December 1925.

Operational history

Villiers II on water photo NACA Aircraft Circular No

The Villiers II entered service with ''Escadrille'' 5C1 based at

Hyères Hyères (), Provençal Occitan: ''Ieras'' in classical norm, or ''Iero'' in Mistralian norm) is a commune in the Var department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France. The old town lies from the sea clustered around t ...

near

Toulon Toulon (, , ; oc, label= Provençal, Tolon , , ) is a city on the French Riviera and a large port on the Mediterranean coast, with a major naval base. Located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, and the Provence province, Toulon is th ...

in Southern France in May 1927, with the aircraft never being operated from ''Béarn''. It was replaced by the single-seat Gourdou-Leseurre GL.32, which did not have the same elaborate features for landing on water in September 1928.

Operators

; * Aéronautique Maritime ** ''Escadrille'' 5C1

Specifications (Vil 2AMC2 )

Villiers II 3 view NACA Aircraft Circular No

References

*Green, William and Swanborough, Gordon. ''The Complete Book of Fighters''. New York:Smithmark, 1994. . * Gunston, Bill. ''World Encyclopedia of Aircraft Manufacturers''. Stroud, UK:Sutton Publishing, 2nd Edition, 2005. .
The Paris Airshow 1926
. ''

Flight Flight or flying is the process by which an object moves through a space without contacting any planetary surface, either within an atmosphere (i.e. air flight or aviation) or through the vacuum of outer space (i.e. spaceflight). This can be a ...

'', 2 December 1926, pp. 775–791.

External links