Riesenflugzeug

A ''Riesenflugzeug'' (plural ''Riesenflugzeuge'', German for "giant aircraft"), sometimes colloquially referred to in English as an R-plane, was any member of a class of large World War I German bombers, possessing at least three aircraft engines, although usually four or more engines. These large multi-engine aircraft could fly several hours with larger bomb loads than the smaller ''Grossflugzeug'' bombers such as the Gotha G.V.

Some of the earliest ''Riesenflugzeuge'' were given G-type designations before being redesignated, but a major distinction was that the requirements for the R-type specified that the engines had to be serviceable in flight. As a result, designs fell into two groups:
*those with the engines mounted centrally inside the fuselage using gearboxes and driveshafts to transfer the power to propellers mounted between the wings, and
*those with conventional powerplant installations mounted in large nacelles or the nose of the aircraft where engineers would be stationed for each group of engines.

The transmission of power from the centrally mounted engines to the remote, most often wing-mounted propellers proved troublesome in practice, and most operational examples of ''Riesenflugzeug''-class aircraft were of the second type, as with the all-direct-drive Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI.

The ''Idflieg'' (''Inspektion der Fliegertruppen'' (Inspection of the Air Force), the German Army department responsible for military aviation), assigned the letter R to this type of aircraft, which would then be followed by a period and a Roman numeral type number. Seaplanes were denoted by adding a lowercase "s" after the "R" in the designation.

The ''Riesenflugzeuge'' were the largest aircraft of World War I. In comparison, the largest equivalent Allied aircraft were the Sikorsky Ilya MurometsThe first successful large aircraft, and the inspiration for the German ''Grossflugzeug'' and ''Riesenflugzeuge'' bombers with a span of , the Caproni Ca.4 with a span of , the one-off Felixstowe Fury flying boat with a span of and the Handley Page V/1500 with a span of . The ''Riesenflugzeuge'' that bombed London during the First World War were larger than any of the German bombers in use during the Second World War.The span Junkers Ju 390, was only used as a transport, and the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor, used for maritime operations had a span of . The largest built, the Siemens-Schuckert R.VIII of 1918, had a wingspan of . It was not until sixteen years later that an aircraft with a larger wingspan, the Soviet Tupolev ''Maksim Gorky'' eight-engined monoplane, was built with a wingspan.

The ''Riesenflugzeuge'' were operational from 1915 to 1919 and most of them were built as "one-off" aircraft.

List of aircraft

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

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External links

*{{cite journal , date=September 18, 1919 , title=The (German) Dornier "Giant Flying-Boat" , format=PDF , journal=Flight , volume=XI , issue=38 , id=No. 560 , page=1258 , url=http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1919/1919%20-%201256.html , accessdate=January 12, 2011 Brief contemporary technical description of the Dornier Rs.III or Rs.IV, with rough diagrams.
"The Four-engine Giant"
''Notes on German Bombers'' in 1918 issue of ''Flight''



in 1919 issue of ''Flight''



in 1919 issue of ''Flight''
1910s German bomber aircraft
Flyingmachines.ru's photo page of many WW I German R-class bombers