Avro 500
| Avro 500 | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Role | Military utility aircraft |
| Manufacturer | Avro |
| Designer | A.V. Roe |
| First flight | 3 March 1912 |
| Introduction | 1912 |
| Primary user | United Kingdom |
| Number built | 18 |
| Duigan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Role | 2 seat biplane |
| National origin | UK |
| Manufacturer | A.V Roe & Co |
| Designer | A.V. Roe |
| First flight | March 1912 |
| Number built | 1 |
| Variants | Avro 500 |
The Avro Type E, Type 500, and Type 502 made up a family of early British military aircraft, regarded by Alliott Verdon Roe as his firm's first truly successful design. It was a forerunner of the Avro 504, one of the outstanding aircraft of the First World War.
The Type E biplane was designed in parallel with the slightly earlier Avro Duigan, differing principally in being slightly larger and having a more powerful (60 horsepower (45 kW)) water-cooled E.N.V. engine. Both were two-bay tractor biplanes with unstaggered parallel-chord wings with rounded tips, a deep rectangular section fuselage bearing rectangular steel-framed stabilisers, elevators and rudder with no fixed fin, and an undercarriage with a pair of wheels on a transverse leaf-spring and a long central skid projecting forward of the propeller. This aircraft layout dominated aircraft design for twenty years: the Avro 500 and the contemporary B.E.1 are among the first truly practical examples built.
The Avro Duigan was single seat tractor biplane built by A.V. Roe for the pioneer Australian aviator John Robertson Duigan in 1911. Roe's first biplane design, the Avro Type D had first flown in April 1911. The Avro Duigan was a major refinement of this fundamentally successful aircraft. It had a square rather than triangular cross section fuselage, simplifying construction and allowing the crew seats to be lower down, giving more protection. The wings were supported using an aerodynamically cleaner ordinary two-bay layout, replacing the two and a half bay arrangement of its predecessor, which had a third pair of interplane struts close to the fuselage. The undercarriage was simpler, a V-strut below the wing leading edge bearing a leaf-spring axle whose wheels had the refinement of covered spokes, and under this a single long skid supported by a second V-strut below the trailing edge and a single strut from the extreme nose of the aircraft. The tailplane was steel framed, with a rectangular fixed stabiliser and elevator and rudder. Other details were as previous aircraft. The fuselage was constructed of wire-braced ash metal covered forward of the cockpits. The observer sat in front with the pilot sitting behind the cut away trailing edge, an arrangement which positioned the front cockpit close to the centre of gravity of the aircraft and allowed it to be flown without a passenger with no change its balance. The wire-braced high aspect ratio two-bay wings had ash spars and poplar ribs with the curved ends formed from cane. Lateral control was by wing warping. A sprung tailskid was mounted below the rudder and small hoops were fitted below the outer interplane struts to protect the wingtips. The aircraft had dual controls and was fitted with small "Cellon" window to improve downward vision.
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