Royal Aircraft Factory BE2

B.E.2
B.E.2c
Role	Reconnaissance, light bomber, night fighter, trainer, coastal patrol aircraft
Manufacturer	Royal Aircraft Factory, Vickers, Bristol
Designer	Geoffrey de Havilland, E.T. Busk
First flight	1 February 1912
Introduction	1912
Retired	1919
Primary user	Royal Flying Corps
Number built	~ 3,500
Variants	Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.9 Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.12

The Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 was a British single-engine tractor two-seat biplane in service with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) from 1912 until the end of World War I. About 3,500 were built. Initially used as front-line reconnaissance aircraft and light bombers; variants of the type were also used as night fighters. The B.E.2 was retained in front-line service long after it had become obsolete, for want of a suitable replacement. After its belated withdrawal it finally served as a trainer, communications aircraft and on anti-submarine coastal patrol duties.

While the type was designed and developed by the Royal Aircraft Factory, the majority of production aircraft were built under contract by private companies, including well known manufacturers as well as firms that had not previously built aircraft.

The B.E.2 has always been the subject of a good deal of controversy. While it proved fundamentally unsuited to air-to-air combat it had a relatively low accident rate, and its high degree of inherent stability actually proved helpful in its artillery observation and aerial photography duties (although it also made it more difficult to manoeuvre quickly).

The B.E.2 was one of the first aircraft designed at what was then called the Royal Balloon Factory (renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory in 1912) under the direction of Mervyn O'Gorman. Its designation followed the system devised by O'Gorman which classified aircraft by their layout: B.E. stood for Blériot Experimental, and was used for aircraft of tractor configuration (although in practice all the B.E. types were biplanes rather than the monoplanes typical of the Bleriot company). The official agenda of the Balloon Factory was research into aircraft design, but the construction of actual aircraft was not officially sanctioned. O'Gorman got around this contradiction by using the factory's secondary responsibility to repair and maintain aircraft belonging to the Royal Flying Corps; existing aircraft needing major repairs were nominally reconstructed but actually transformed into new designs, generally retaining little except the engine.

The first two B.E. aircraft were flown within a month of each other and had the same basic design, the work of Geoffrey de Havilland, who was at the time both the chief designer and the test pilot at the Balloon Factory. The layout of these aircraft has come to be seen as a conventional design, but when it first appeared this was not the case. Rather, with the contemporary Avro 500, it was one of the designs which established the tractor biplane as the dominant aircraft layout for a considerable time. On its first public appearance Flight wrote that "everything one could see of the machine was of singular interest".

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