Nieuport 28

Купить бумажную книгу и читать

Nieuport 28 (Windsock Datafile 36)

By Jon Guttman

Publisher: Albatros Prodns. 1992 40 Pages

ISBN: 0948414448

PDF 33 MB

Considered by many to be one of the cleanest and most aesthetically pleasing fighter designs of WWI, the popular Nieuport 28 found fame with American pilots in 1918, four AEF units being equipped with the type. Its post-war use Switzerland and Hollywood ensured a healthy number of survivors and several original examples of the type are known to exist around the world. American enthusiast Jon Guttman has selected rare material from various personal archives to present this unique pictorial record which, coupled with many close-up detail photos and extensive camouflage notes, provides modellers with the best documentation yet published on this classic French fighter.

If ever a classic aeroplane owed its fame to the men who flew it, it was the Nieuport 28, which might otherwise have been relegated to the long list of aviation history's 'also-rans'. One of the most elegant-looking aeroplanes of World War I, the Nieuport 28 was pleasant to fly but far from outstanding for its time and plagued by some disturbing design flaws. Rejected by the French Air Service, it became the first operational fighter in the American Expeditionary Force simply because there were not enough Spads to go around. It went on to achieve^ several other firsts and became associated, for better or worse, with some of the most distinguished airmen in the US Army Air Service. In the post-war years, the Nieuport 28 inspired new generations of flyers, modellers and, later, aeroplane restorers by 'starring' in a number of films — demonstrating that good looks counted as much for aeroplanes as they did for actors in Hollywood.

By late Summer 1917, the series of rotary-engined sesquiplane fighters created by Gustave Delage for the Societe Anonyme des Etablissements Nieuport had reached — indeed, had passed — the apex of its development with the Nieuport 27.