Bristol Scout

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The Bristol Scout was a simple, single seat, rotary-engined biplane originally intended as a civilian racing aircraft.

Like other similar fast, light aircraft of the period - it was acquired by the RNAS and the RFC as a "scout", or fast reconnaissance type.

In the event it was one of the first single-seaters to be used as fighter aircraft, although it was not possible to fit it with an effective armament until the first British synchronisation gears became available, by which time it was outmoded by later types.

Single seat fighters continued to be called "scouts" in British usage into the early 1920s.

Development

The prototype for the Bristol Scout was designed in the second half of 1913 by Frank Barnwell and Harry Busteed.

The first flight was first on 23 February 1914 by Busteed, and it was first shown to the public at the March 1914 London Olympia exhibition centre's Aero Show event.

It had the "racing" lines fashionable in light single seaters of the 1913-1914 period, with characteristics such as a main landing gear wheel track measured at only 39 inches (99 cm) that was barely wider than the fuselage, only about a one half degree dihedral angle on the wing panels, making them look almost totally "flat" across from a nose-on view, and an engine cowl that had no open frontal area, even though the extreme bottom was sliced away horizontally to allow cooling air to get to its seven cylinder 80 hp Gnome Lambda rotary engine.

It was fitted with a squared-planform "all-flying" rudder with no fixed vertical fin, similar to that used on contemporary Nieuport, Morane, and Fokker types.

Operational history


The period of service of the Bristol Scout (1914 to 1916) marked the genesis of the fighter aircraft as a distinct type, and many of the earliest attempts to arm British "tractor" aircraft with weaponry were tested in action using Bristol Scouts.

These began with the arming of the second Scout B, RFC number 648, with two rifles, one per side, aimed outwards and forwards to clear the propeller arc.

Two of the Royal Flying Corps' early Bristol Scout C aircraft, numbers 1609 and 1611, flown by Captain Lanoe Hawker with the RFC's No. 6 Squadron, were each in their turn armed with a single Lewis machine gun on the left side of the fuselage, within a mount that Capt. Hawker had designed himself, almost identically in the manner of the rifles tried on the second Scout B.

When Hawker's No.1611 aircraft was used by him to down two German aircraft and force off a third on 25 July 1915 over Passchendaele and Zillebeke he was awarded the first Victoria Cross ever given for a British military pilot's actions in aerial combat.

A number of the 24 initial production RNAS' Scout C aircraft were armed with single Lewis machine guns, sometimes with the Lewis gun mounted atop the upper wing centre section in the manner of the Nieuport 11, and even more common was an apparently very dubious choice of placement by some RNAS pilots, in mounting the Lewis gun on the forward fuselage of their Scout Cs, just as if it were a synchronized weapon (which it was not) firing directly forward and through the propeller arc; an action likely to result in serious propeller damage.

The type of bullet-deflecting wedges as Roland Garros had tried on his Morane-Saulnier Type N monoplane were also tried on one of the RFC's last Scout Cs, No. 5303, but since this seemed, in this instance, to have also required the use of the Morane Type N's immense "casserole" spinner, which almost totally blocked cooling air from reaching this particular Scout C's 80-hp Le Rhône rotary engine, the deflecting-wedge concept for propeller protection from bullets was not pursued further with Bristol Scouts.

n the early part of the war, in attempts to down German Zeppelin airships, one unusual weapon tried from a RNAS Scout D was the Ranken Dart, a type of droppable, explosive-laden flechette with 1 lb (0.45 kg) of explosive per projectile.

Scout D No. 8953, flown by Flt. Lt. C. T. Freeman, flew from the deck of the flight-deck-converted Isle of Man packet steamer HMS Vindex (formerly with the civilian name Viking), which possessed a takeoff deck on its forward half, and on 2 August 1916, Flt Lt. Freeman tried to down the Zeppelin L.17 with Ranken Darts, released from two vertically-oriented internal cylindrical containers located just behind his feet, in the belly of his Scout D.

None of the darts did any damage to the Zeppelin, and since Freeman's aircraft could not land back on the Vindex, and was too far from land for a safe return, he had to ditch his Scout D in the ocean after the unsuccessful attack.