Lakes Water Hen
| Water Bird | |
|---|---|
| Role | two seat experimental seaplane |
| National origin | United Kingdom |
| Manufacturer | A.V. Roe Ltd |
| Designer | (float) E.W. Wakefield |
| First flight | (as seaplane) 25 November 1911 |
| Number built | 1 |
| Developed from | Glenn Curtiss design |
The Lakes Water Bird, sometimes known as the Avro Curtiss-type is remembered as the first consistently successful British seaplane, developed by the Windemere-based Lakes Flying Co, during 1911.
Large bodies of water appealed to several aviation pioneers in the first two decades of the 20th century since they offered large spaces for takeoff and emergency landings. Builders also anticipated naval interest. It emerged that one of the main problems was getting the floats to leave the water, that is to "unstick". The first seaplane to fly, on 28 March 1910 at Martigues, France was built by Henri Fabre, though the machine built by Glenn Curtiss and first flown on 26 January 1911 was the first practical seaplane. In England A.V.Roe & Co had put the first Type D on floats and it left the water on 18 November 1911 at Barrow-in-Furness using stepped floats, but dropped back into the water and was damaged. It flew successfully in April 1912, although it was underpowered.
The Lakes Water Bird was built in 1911 for E.W. Wakefield, of the Lakes Flying Company, Windermere by A.V. Roe, who would build aircraft to the designs of individual customers. It was built as a landplane with the intention of converting it to a seaplane once testing was complete. Wakefield had been interested in waterborne aircraft since 1909 and had performed experiments with different float designs towed at speed across Lake Windermere. Unsticking problems persisted until he visited Henri Fabre in France and got useful advice on float design. The 12 ft (3.66 m) long float for the Water Bird followed Glen Curtiss' float and was built by boat builders Borwick of Bowness-on-Windermere using mahogany with aluminium and canvas.
Avro built the aircraft in Manchester, transporting it to Brooklands for its first flight on 25 May 1911. It was a two-bay single-seat pusher biplane with wings of unequal span. The outer half of each upper wing carried a pair of ailerons; the larger inner one had a semicircular trailing edge extending well behind the wing trailing edge. Bamboo outriggers fore and aft of the wings supported leading elevators and tail surfaces plus rudder. Both elevator and rudder were operated by bamboo pushrods. Power was provided by a 50 hp (37 kW) Gnome Omega seven-cylinder rotary engine driving an 8 ft 6in (2.59 m) propeller.
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