INSIGHTS BLACKBURN MONOPLANES
Today, Robert Blackburn’s Type D monoplane still resides at Old Warden in the safe hands of the Shuttleworth Collection. With the registration G-AANI, it’s the oldest airworthy British aircraft in the world, but what is it like to fly this unique machine? Shuttleworth chief pilot Roger ‘Dodge’ Bailey provides valuable insights.
“The first thing I should say about the Blackburn”, ‘Dodge’ opines, “is that when you fly the other Edwardian aeroplanes — we have the Blériot, the Deperdussin, the Avro Triplane and the Boxkite of that era — all those aeroplanes have some signi ficant de ficiency in handling qualities because of the way they’re designed. For example, all of them except for the Blériot have no dihedral. They all require a particular technique to fly safely; a certain control strategy that’s rather more to do with what you don’t do, rather than what you do.
“Moving from the Deperdussin to the Blériot, you almost have to change heads. In the Deperdussin, if you want to turn you use the lateral control, balanced with the rudder like you would in a normal aeroplane, because there is no rolling moment due to sideslip as there is no dihedral. With the Blériot, which has …
