The Beardmore WB.III was a British carrier-based fighter biplane of World War I. It was a development of the

Sopwith Pup The Sopwith Pup is a British single-seater biplane fighter aircraft built by the Sopwith Aviation Company. It entered service with the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps in the autumn of 1916. With pleasant flying characteristi ...

that Beardmore was then building under licence, but was specially adapted for shipboard use.

Design and development

Compared to the

on which it was based, the WB.III featured a redesigned wing cellule with no stagger and an extra set of struts inboard, facilitating folding for stowage; a modified fuselage that carried emergency floatation gear; and main undercarriage that could be folded for stowage on the WB.IIIF. Later examples, designated WB.IIID, could jettison their undercarriage for safer water landings. As many as one hundred were built, with small numbers deployed on various Royal Navy warships including the

aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and hangar facilities for supporting, arming, deploying and recovering carrier-based aircraft, shipborne aircraft. Typically it is the ...

s and ; and

seaplane tender A seaplane tender is a boat or ship that supports the operation of seaplanes. Some of these vessels, known as seaplane carriers, could not only carry seaplanes but also provided all the facilities needed for their operation; these ships are rega ...

s HMS ''Nairana'' and HMS ''Pegasus''. Performance was inferior that of to the Pup and it was largely superseded by the Sopwith 2F1 Ships Camel.

Operators

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Royal Naval Air Service The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was the air arm of the Royal Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty (United Kingdom), Admiralty's Air Department, and existed formally from 1 July 1914 to 1 April 1918, when it was merged with the British ...

Specifications

References

Bibliography

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Design and development

Operators

Specifications

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading