Henry Farman HF.30A
| HF.30 | |
|---|---|
| Role | Fighter |
| National origin | France |
| Manufacturer | Henry Farman |
| Designer | Henry Farman |
| First flight | December 1916 |
| Number built | 1 |
The Henry Farman HF.30 was a two-seat biplane designed as a fighter in France in 1916 and powered by a single, water-cooled radial engine. It showed poor flight characteristics and only one was built, though it was modified twice. It should not be confused with the similarly named Farman F.30 of 1915, a completely different aircraft which was used in large numbers by the Imperial Russian Air Service.
The Henry Farman HF.30 was amongst the last Farman aircraft to be produced under Henry Farman's name, before the brothers formally joined forces. It represented a departure from the pusher configuration with which they had previously been associated, in which the propellor was mounted amidships at the rear of the engine, and the tail was only a lightweight framework for the control surfaces. The HF.30 adopted what was becoming the more conventional aeroplane design, with the propeller at the front and a continuous streamlined fuselage. It first flew in December 1916.
The HF.30A was a metal framed biplane with considerable overhang of the upper planes, a fairly common feature of Henry Farman's designs (as in the F.40), though possibly it was not strictly a sesquiplane. The inner part of the wing structure, out to the tips of the lower wing, formed a single bay unit, without stagger and braced by simple parallel interplane struts. These struts continued above the upper surface, with the outer parts of the upper wing wire braced to them. Ailerons were fitted to the outer, upper wings.
The fuselage was mounted between the wings on central struts above and below and was circular in cross-section, tapering towards the tail. The horizontal tail surfaces were rectangular, and the rudder and wide chord fin formed a shallow triangle. There were two cockpits, seating the pilot under the wing and the gunner further aft with a large radiator between them. The 260 hp (120 kW) water-cooled Canton-Unné X-9 radial engine gave the HF.30A a short nose. Its simple conventional undercarriage had a single mainwheel on each main leg and radius arm.
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