Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Morane Saulnier-N

The Morane-Saulnier N, was a French monoplane fighter airplane from the First World War. It was designed in and manufactured by Morane-Saulnier, it entered into service in April 1915 with the French Aéronautique Militaire, who named it Morane-Saulnier MS.5C1.
Even if it was a clean and streamlined aircraft, it wasn't easy to fly due to a mixture of stiff lateral control caused by using wing warping instead of ailerons, sensitive pitch and yaw controls caused by using an all-flying tail, and very high landing speed for the period. It was armed with a single unsynchronised forward-firing 7.92mm Hotchkiss machine gun which used the defector wedges, first used in the Morane-Saulnier L to fire through the propeller arc. It was powered by a single 80hp (60Kw) Le Rhône 9C air-cooled rotary engine.
A large metal "casserolle" spinner was designed to make the aircraft more streamlined, but it was found that it overheated the engine, so many pilots removed it. In fact, in 1915, most of them were removed so overheating problems dissappeared with little loss in performance.
Forty-nine aircrafts were manufactured but they were already obsolete by the end of 1915 in the Western Front as the aircraft development ran very fast back then.
A version with a modified tail was introduced in very small numbers, the type Nm.
It served with the French Aéronautique Militaire at the hands of mighty pilots like Roland Garros. It's service was highly successful as they had an aicraft that could face the German Pfalz E.I. It  also served with some squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps, where it earned the nickname of "The Bullet" and was also manned by pilots of the 19th Squadron of the Imperial Russian Air Force, operating in Ukraine, where at least three of them served with the Ukranian Galician Army, of the West Ukrainian People's Republic during the years of the Russian Revolution and Russian civil war.










Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morane-Saulnier_N
2. http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_morane_saulnier_Type_N.html
3. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters

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