Tuesday 31 December 2019

Loire 130

As this is the last post of the year, we would like to wish all our readers a merry new year's eve and a happy 2020! That's why in this post we bring you not one but three drawings.
The Loire 130 was a French hydroplane that saw service during World War II and also post-war French colonial conflicts.
It's origins can be traced back to mid-1930s when the French Navy made a requirement for a reconnaissance seaplane or flying boat that could serve aboard French battleships and cruisers of the time. It was chosen in 1936 against five competitors (Bréguet 610, Gourdou-Leseurre GL-820 HY, Levasseur PL.200 and Potez CAMS 120).
It was powered by a single 12-cylinder Hispano-Suiza 12Xirs liquid-cooled vee engine, rated at 710 hp. It was armed with two 7,5 mm Darne machine guns, one of them placed just above the propeller, in a defensive position. It also had a payload of 150 kg of bombs, as it could carry a 75 kg bomb under each wing.
After flying for the first time on 19th November 1934, its performance was considered good enough so a production order for 150 machines was placed and in August 1936 it entered mass production. A total of 125 machines were manufactured by Loire Aviation (later named Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques de l'Ouest) in the French city of St. Nazaire from 1937 until 1941 when, under German occupation production ceased. In 1938 it entered officially in service replacing most of shipborne seaplanes and flying boats already in service.
Of those 125, one of them was the prototype, 111 were sent to the French Navy and 12 to the French Air Force which used a modified version called Loire 130CI which had an enlarged radiator. The French Air Force employed it in the colonies, specially in Indochina, where it served through the Franco-Thai War in early 1941.
In the late 1930s the Loire 130 was serving on board of most French battleships and cruisers, as well as aborad the Commandant Teste seaplane carrier, which had assigned a squadron of six machines in 1939. After the fall of France in June 1940, most of them passed on to the Vichy France's Air Force and, as previously mentioned, some of them were used to fly reconnaissance missions during the Franco-Thai War. The German Luftwaffe also performed some testing in 1940-1941 with some captured aircraft but rejected it due to its obsolescence and poor armament, which was deemed as "not sufficient under any circumstance", however it seems that at least one of them could've been used as an improvised transport from the coastal city of St. Nazaire to the town of Mâcon, in central France.
Although looking quite obsolete and having quite a very marginal performance numbers for its time, some of them survived the war and kept on service until 1949-1951, specially in French Indochina.



























Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loire_130
2. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loire_130 (translated) 
3. http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/archive/index.php?t-2066.html
4. https://www.valka.cz/Loire-130M-t25885

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