Stout Batwing
| Stout Batwing | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| The first Batwing at Dayton, Ohio’s McCook Aviation Field circa 1918 | |
| Role | |
| National origin | United States |
| Manufacturer | Stout Engineering Laboratories |
| Designer | William Bushnell Stout |
| First flight | 1918 |
| Introduction | 1918 |
| Number built | 1 |
| Developed from | Batwing "Vampire" |
Batwing was a name given to at least two aircraft developed by William Bushnell Stout.
The first was an experimental low aspect ratio flying wing. The aircraft used wood veneer construction and was an early example of cantilever wing design. The internally braced wing was also one of the first American aircraft designed without drag-producing struts.
The second was the Batwing Limousine, a three-seat cabin monoplane with a conventional fuselage and high-mounted wing.
This article describes the first Batwing.
During World War I, William Bushnell Stout was employed by Packard in 1917 when he was appointed as a technical advisor to the War production board who in turn gave Stout a contract to develop an aircraft. Funded by the Motor Products Corporation, Stout developed the "Batwing" aircraft hoping to sell the aircraft to the United States Army Air Service. Stout first experimented with an all-wood flying wing glider, the "Batwing Glider", tested at Ford Airport in 1926. Stout's design was nicknamed "Bushnell's Turtle" (a reference to the unrelated David Bushnell's American Turtle shape).
The Batwing was designed with an unusually broad chord, thick section cantilevered wing with the horizontal stabilizers set very close to the rear of the aircraft.
The wings were covered with a 3 ply wood veneer only 1/20th of an inch thick. The internal bracing consisted of hundreds of spruce struts. Nine spars tested to 1 ton of load each. Like encountering a Junkers F.13, Bill Stout abandoned wood construction for metal corrugated skinning over a metal frame.
To reduce drag, the aircraft employed a cantilever wing without support wires or struts. This required a "thick" wing to build a spar deep enough to support the aircraft. To maintain the thin airfoil sections commonly used at the time, the chord also had to be longer as the wing became thicker. In the case of the Batwing, the chord was almost the entire length of the aircraft. Since the spar did not need to be as thick toward the tips to support the load, the chord decreased further out along the wing, forming an oval shaped wing. As ideal as this was, it caused significant engineering challenge. Further aerodynamic drag reductions came from having the water-cooled engine embedded into the wing with retractable radiators.
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Wikipedia