Santos-Dumont Demoiselle
| Demoiselle | |
|---|---|
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|
| Type 20 Demoiselle | |
| Role | Experimental aircraft |
| National origin | France |
| Designer | Alberto Santos-Dumont |
| First flight | 1907 |
The Santos-Dumont Demoiselle ("Damselfly" or "") was a series of aircraft built in France by Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. They were light-weight monoplanes with a wire-braced wing mounted above an open-framework fuselage built from bamboo. The pilot's seat was below the wing and between the main wheels of the undercarriage. The rear end of the boom carried a tailwheel and a cruciform tail.
The first aircraft of the type was the Santos-Dumont No. 19, which was built to attempt to win the Grand Prix d'Aviation offered for a one kilometre closed-circuit flight. Powered by a 15 kW (20 hp) air-cooled Dutheil & Chalmers flat-twin engine mounted on the leading edge of the wing, it had a wingspan of 5.1 m. (16 ft 9 in), was 8 m (26 ft 3 in) long and weighed only 56 kg (123 lb) including fuel. It had a pair of hexagonal rudders below the wing on either side of the pilot, a forward mounted hexagonal elevator in front of the pilot and a cruciform tail which, like the boxkite-style canard surfaces on the earlier 14bis biplane of 1906, pivoted on a universal joint to function both as elevator and rudder mounted at the end of a substantial single boom. There was no provision for lateral control. The undercarriage consisted of a pair of wheels in front of the pilot and a third behind, supplemented by a tailskid.
Santos-Dumont made three flights on 17 November 1907 at Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Later, Santos-Dumont made a number of modifications: he repositioned the engine, placing it below the wing in front of the pilot, fitted a different propeller and deleted the forward elevator and rudders.
Santos-Dumont's next aircraft, the Demoiselle No. 20, was first flown with an 18 kW (24-hp) Dutheil et Chalmers later replaced by a 22 kW (30 hp) Darracq-built liquid-cooled opposed twin engine of approximately 3.2 litre displacement. The fuselage consisted of three bamboo tubes forming the primary longerons, of about 5 cm (2 in) diameter, connected by oval steel tubes. For ease of transportation the bamboo tubes were divided into two sections, joined together by brass sockets. The parallel-chord wings had two spars made of ash and bamboo ribs All versions had a pair of lightweight thin-tube radiators mounted under the wing, running the entire meter chord of the wing. It used wing warping for lateral control, with control cabling that only pulled down alternately on the outer section of the rear wing spar with no "upwards" warp capability.
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