The Sopwith Bee was a small

biplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While ...

built in 1916 as a personal aircraft for

Harry Hawker Harry George Hawker, MBE, AFC (22 January 1889 – 12 July 1921) was an Australian aviation pioneer. He was the chief test pilot for Sopwith and was also involved in the design of many of their aircraft. After the First World War, he co-fou ...

, Sopwith's chief test pilot.

History

The Bee was a single-bay biplane powered by a

Gnome Omega The Gnome 7 Omega (commonly called the Gnome 50 hp) is a French seven-cylinder, air-cooled aero engine produced by Gnome et Rhône. It was shown at the Paris Aero Salon held in December 1908 and was first flown in 1909. It was the world's ...

rotary engine, intended for use by Hawker as a runabout and for

aerobatics Aerobatics is the practice of flying maneuvers involving aircraft attitudes that are not used in conventional passenger-carrying flights. The term is a portmanteau of "aerial" and "acrobatics". Aerobatics are performed in aeroplanes and glider ...

. As with contemporary Sopwith fighter aircraft, great effort was made to concentrate the heaviest components as close to the aircraft's

centre of gravity In physics, the center of mass of a distribution of mass in space (sometimes referred to as the balance point) is the unique point where the weighted relative position of the distributed mass sums to zero. This is the point to which a force may ...

in order to optimise manoeverability: this necessitated a large semi-circular cutout in the trailing edge of the upper wing to accommodate the pilot. Lateral control was achieved by

wing warping Wing warping was an early system for lateral (roll) control of a fixed-wing aircraft. The technique, used and patented by the Wright brothers, consisted of a system of pulleys and cables to twist the trailing edges of the wings in opposite direc ...

.Mason 1992, p.110 The Bee was subsequently fitted with a single synchronised

Vickers .303 The Vickers machine gun or Vickers gun is a water-cooled .303 British (7.7 mm) machine gun produced by Vickers Limited, originally for the British Army. The gun was operated by a three-man crew but typically required more men to move and o ...

machine gun, possibly with a view to meeting the Admiralty's requirement for a small scout aircraft capable of operating from

torpedo-boat destroyers In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast, manoeuvrable, long-endurance warship intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet, convoy or battle group and defend them against powerful short range attackers. They were originally developed in ...

, but this came to nothing and no further development of the type was carried out. The aircraft was sometimes referred to as the ''Tadpole''.

Specifications

References

Citations

Bibliography

* Mason, Francis K. ''The British Fighter Since 1912''. London: Putnam, 1992. {{Sopwith Aviation Company aircraft 1910s British fighter aircraft 1910s British experimental aircraft Biplanes

Bee Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamil ...

Single-engined tractor aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1916 Rotary-engined aircraft