The Wassmer WA 20 Javelot ( en, Javelin) and its very similar successors the WA 21 Javelot II and WA 22 Super Javelot are single seat gliders 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 1950s and 1960s. Well over a hundred were sold as club aircraft and over fifty remain on the French civil register in 2010.

Design and development

The Javelot was designed by Maurice Collard to provide a simply constructed glider with good performance to replace pre-war

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- designed aircraft like the

DFS Weihe The DFS Weihe (English: ''Harrier'') is a German single-seat, high-wing, 18 metre wingspan, high-performance glider that was designed by Hans Jacobs in 1937-38. Design and development Jacobs designed the Weihe to be the pre-eminent performance ...

and French built

DFS Olympia Meise The DFS Olympia Meise (German: "Olympic Titmouse") was a German sailplane designed by the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS) for Olympic competition, based on the DFS Meise. Design and development After the Olympic games in Berlin ...

(Nord 2000), as well as the first post war generation of French designs such as the Arsenal Air 100, then widely used by French clubs. The original WA 20 Javelot, later known as the Javelot I and first flown in August 1956, has an all wood wing of 16.08 m (52 ft 9 in) span and a wing area of 15.5 m² (199.6 sq ft) giving it an aspect ratio of 16.7. It is shoulder mounted and is in two pieces built around single box spars with

leading edge The leading edge of an airfoil surface such as a wing is its foremost edge and is therefore the part which first meets the oncoming air.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, third edition'', page 305. Aviation Supplies & Academics, ...

D-shaped,

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 ...

skinned torsion boxes. The wing is fabric covered aft of the spar. There are small endplates at the wing tips, partly to protect them on the ground. The airbrakes deploy both above and below the wing. The Javelot has a flat-sided, polygonal fuselage, shaped by a steel tube frame and with fabric covering. Forward of the wing there are four

longerons 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 ...

and the fuselage is deep and flat sided, which together with a deep, flat topped and sided canopy, which curves in side view, forms a blunt nose. The undercarriage is a combination of rubber sprung nose skid and fixed monowheel. Behind the wing the fuselage has only three longerons, tapers and has a prominent dorsal ridge. The wooden

fin A fin is a thin component or appendage attached to a larger body or structure. Fins typically function as foils that produce lift or thrust, or provide the ability to steer or stabilize motion while traveling in water, air, or other fluids. Fin ...

and

rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (generally aircraft, air or watercraft, water). On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to ...

have straight edges and a rounded top; the

tailplane A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabiliser, is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyroplane ...

, which carries a one piece

elevator An elevator or lift is a wire rope, cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or deck (building), decks of a building, watercraft, ...

is mounted on top of the fuselage. There is a tailskid.< A revised, Standard competition class version, the WA 21 Javelot II made its first flight on 25 March 1958. This has a modified wing with a span of 15 m (49 ft 3 in) and 4° of dihedral on the outer parts though none on the 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 ( ...

centre section. The Javelot II also introduced separated pairs of

differential ailerons 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 t ...

as well as altering the wing to fuselage connection. By mid-1960, 50 Javelots had been delivered. The final production variant, though one that continued to be improved, was the WA 22 Super Javelot, which first flew in June 1961. Initially this combined the wing of the Javelot II with a fuselage built around the same steel tube structure but now with a resin bonded glass cloth covering forward of the wings. The nose was extended to be better streamlined and a new, lower, single piece canopy introduced. Aft, the vertical surfaces remained wood but were swept. The 1964 version of the Super Javelot increased the dihedral on the outer panels to 5.50°, refined the aerodynamics of the wing root to fuselage junction and covered the whole wing with birch ply to encourage

laminar flow In fluid dynamics, laminar flow is characterized by fluid particles following smooth paths in layers, with each layer moving smoothly past the adjacent layers with little or no mixing. At low velocities, the fluid tends to flow without lateral mi ...

. The Wassmer WA 23 was a final, experimental development. It had a Super Javelot fuselage fitted with a new, 18 m (59 ft 1 in) span wing, an aspect ratio of 22 and a new airfoil profile specially designed by Maurice Collard. The empty weight of the WA 23 was 295 kg (650 lb). It flew for the first time on 6 August 1962.

Operational history

In 2010 the civil aircraft registers of European countries outside Russia contained four Javelot Is, fourteen Javelot IIs (one dismantled) and thirty five Super Javelots. All fifty three were French registered.

Variants

;WA 20 Javelot: First flight August 1956. Later referred to as the Javelot I. ;WA 21 Javelot II: First flight 25 March 1958. ;WA 22 Super Javelot: First flight 26 June 1961. Modified forward fuselage and swept fin. ;WA 22 Super Javelot 64: 1964 model, with increased outer wing dihedral. ;WA-22-28 ;WA-23: Experimental development of the WA 22 with a new wing of 18 m (59 ft) span and aspect ratio 22.

Aircraft on display

* Musée Aéronautique Berry, Touchay, France - Javelot II * Musée Regional de l'Air, Angers, France - Super Javelot

Specifications (WA 21 Javelot II)

References