Friday 24 June 2016

Arsenal-Delanne 10

Arsenal-Delanne 10 was an experimental French aircraft. It had a distinctive tandem wing and rear cockpit.

It was a two-seat fighter designed by Maurice Delanne and built by Arsenal de l'Aeronautique and was of the so-called Nenadovich configuration or tandem winged which provided a continuous slot effect and offered an exceptional center of gravity range. It was made entirely out of metal stressed-skin construction employing a sandwich technique with a smooth dural skin welded to a corrugated sheet.
Both pilot and gunner sat in tandem under a single canopy at the rear of the fuselage which was leveled with the rear wing which carried twin tailplanes. Such arrangement gave the gunner a clear field of fire for his, never installed, armament of two 7,5mm machine guns suplemented by a 20mm cannon firing through the propeller hub and two more machine-guns placed in the wings. The tailwheel undercarriage was retractable and the airplane was powered by a single 860hp Hispano-Suiza 12Ycrs 12-Cylinder liquid-cooled engine.

The first prototype was virtually completed at Villacoublay when the Germans occupied the factory in June 1940. However, the work on the aircraft continued after the ocupation in a desultory fashion and it flew for the first time on October 1941 and, after completion of the innitial test programme it was ferried to Germany for further trials.










Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal-Delanne_10
2. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters

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