ANF Les Mureaux 117

 

The ANF Les Mureaux 117 was a French two-seater parasol scout aircraft of the 1930s. It was powered by a single Hispano-Suiza 12Ybrs rated at 848 hp of power which drove a two-bladed wooden propeller, the same type which powered the Mureaux 113. 

With a crew of two (pilot and observer/bomber), it was armed with two Vickers 0.303 in machine guns mounted in the engine plus another one mounted at the rear cockpit for the observer in a defensive configuration. This machine gun was replaced in later versions by the 7.5 mm MAC machine gun. Like the Mureaux 115 it was also initially fitted with a single Lewis machine gun which could fire through the bottom hatch of the observer's cockpit but it was quickly removed and never saw real use. It also had provision for a total of 200 kg (440 lb) of bombs placed under the main fuselage and the wing.

As the aircraft could perform both as a pure recon airplane or as a recon-bomber, the Armée de l'Air (French Air Force) gave the suffix of R.2 B.2 (the letter 'R' standing for 'Reconnaissance' and the letter 'B' standing for 'Bombardier' - Bomber) with the number two making reference to the number of crew members the type needed. Though, eventually, only 16 of them were equipped with bombs, so it wasn't very common. 

The Mureaux 117 differed from other types of the 110 family in having a reinforced wing with internal braces. Given that the aircraft comes from the Mureaux 113, work on the prototype started back in 1933 but it wasn't until January 1935 when the prototype took off for the first time. As part of the contract issued by the French Air Ministry, which sought to replace the older and outdated, though venerable, Potez 25 biplane recon airplane, a total of 115 Mureaux 117 were manufactured at Atelier des Mureaux in Les Mureaux, close to Paris from 1935 until 1936 when work on the more promising Potez 630 (which would eventually derive into the Potez 63.11) was already under design. 

However, as deliveries of those more advanced types were very slow, the Mureaux 117 (together with the Mureaux 115) was still in active service in September 1939 when World War 2 started, so it constituted the backbone of the Armée de l'Air's short-range aerial recon force equipping nine Groupes Aériens d'Observation (Aerial Observation Groups) which performed regular scouting missions over the German Siegfried Line during the period known as the "Phoney War". By April 1940, just one month before the main German attack, the airplane was still serving in numbers, many of them in the French African colonies. Anyway, when France fell in late June the type was written off and eventually scrapped by the Armée de l'Air de l'Armistice (Vichy French Air Force).

Oddly enough, back in 1938 a French right-wing newspaper published some news about the French government having sold some Mureaux 117 (and 115) to the Spanish Republican Government to help them in the Spanish Civil War. Those news turned out to be fake, but it's not reason to hold us from drawing an hypothetical Mureaux 117 serving with the Spanish Republican Air Force.

Sources:

1. http://www.airwar.ru/enc/other1/mureaux117.html (translated)

2. https://www.valka.cz/ANF-Les-Mureaux-117-R-2-B-2-t42734

3. http://bioold.science.ku.dk/drnash/model/spain/index.html (accesible only through the wayback machine)