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The Sopwith 5F.1 Dolphin was a British fighter aircraft manufactured by the Sopwith Aviation Company. It was used by the Royal Flying Corps and its successor, the Royal Air Force, during the First World War. The Dolphin entered service on the Western Front in early 1918 and proved to be a formidable fighter. The aircraft was not retained in the ...
The Vickers F.B.5 (Fighting Biplane 5) (known as the "Gunbus") was a British two-seat pusher military biplane of the First World War.Armed with a single .303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis gun operated by the observer in the front of the nacelle, it was the first aircraft purpose-built for air-to-air combat to see service, making it the world's first operational fighter aircraft.
The design was a development of the earlier Vickers F.B.12 prototypes; [2] and was a two-bay biplane with a high-mounted nacelle for the pilot and an initial armament of two .303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis Guns. Behind this was a water-cooled 200 hp (150 kW) Hispano-Suiza engine driving the propeller.
The Vickers response, the F.B.11, designed by R. L. Howard-Flanders, was a large, single-bay, biplane of tractor layout. The pilot and one gunner sat in separate but closely spaced cockpits under the trailing edge of the upper wing, while a second gunner sat in a nacelle, or "fighting top", attached to, and extending forward of the upper wing.
The Vickers F.B.19 was a British single-seat fighting scout of the First World War, developed from the Barnwell Bullet prototype, and sometimes known as the Vickers Bullet. It served with the Royal Flying Corps and the Imperial Russian Air Service , which subsequently led to the Red Air Force adopting it during the Russian Civil War .
At the start of the First World War, Vickers entered into a partnership with the Hart Engine Company to develop a 150 hp (110 kW) nine-cylinder radial engine designed by Hart. This engine was planned to power a number of new designs by Vickers, the first of which was a small single-engine pusher biplane fighter , the F.B.12 .
Work started on another totally new design in mid-1914, the F.E.2a, specifically intended as a "fighter", or machine gun carrier – in the same class as the Vickers FB.5 "Gunbus". [7] Apart from the "Farman" layout it bore no direct relationship with either of the two earlier designs: the outer wing panels were identical with those of the B.E.2c .
Cheesman, E.F. (ed.) Fighter Aircraft of the 1914–1918 War. Letchworth, UK: Harleyford, 1960; The Great War, television documentary by the BBC. Gray, Peter & Thetford, Owen German Aircraft of the First World War. London, Putnam, 1962. Guttman, Jon. Pusher Aces of World War 1: Volume 88 of Osprey Aircraft of the Aces: Volume 88 of Aircraft of ...