Slingsby Falcon 3
| Slingsby Falcon 3 | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Falcon 3 in 1938 |
|
| Type: | School glider |
| Design country: |
Germany / Great Britain |
| Manufacturer: | |
| First flight: |
May 1935 |
| Production time: |
1935-1938 |
| Number of pieces: |
9 |
The Slingsby Type 4 (T.4) Falcon 3 was a two-seat training glider manufactured by the British manufacturer Slingsby Sailplanes, Scarborough , which was developed in the 1930s from the single-seat training aircraft Slingsby Falcon .
history
The Birmingham stockbroker Espin Hardwick commissioned Slingsby in 1934 for a two-seater version of the Falcon. There were already two-seater school machines in England, such as B. the Kassel SK-3 Hercules, but what Hardwick wanted was the world's first school glider with side-by-side seats. The redesign of the single-seat Falcon 1 or 2 posed major problems for Slingsby and took several months to complete. Basically, however, the design was an enlarged version of the original Lippisch Falcon. In addition to the changed number of seats and the dimensions, the Falcon 3 mainly differed from the single-seater Falcon due to an additional rectangular wing center section.
In May 1935 the prototype was delivered to Hardwick, the flight performance turned out to be so convincing that more copies were ordered. These differed from the prototype in that the fuselage was completely clad in plywood and the wing center section was covered with transparent celluloid to improve the upward view. With these and other small improvements, eight copies were made for British sailing clubs by December 1938, one of which was then exported to Belgium.
Among the five British gliders that took part in the first international championships on the Wasserkuppe in July 1937 was a Falcon 3. The FAI had recently set up a new category for two-seater records, in which the pilots Murray and reached on July 12th Fox achieved a flight time of 9 hours 48 minutes, making them the first record holders. Since Ernst Jachtmann had already achieved a flight duration of over 40 hours in the solo category in the same year , the two-seater record remained without any particular public response.
Until the beginning of the Second World War , only one Falcon 3 had to be written off after an accident, the rest were taken over by the Air Training Corps . In 1944 four or five copies were still airworthy, the last aircraft to fly was badly damaged after a landing accident on Bramcote Naval Air Station in 1947 and then probably burned.
Technical specifications
| Parameter | Data |
|---|---|
| crew | 2 |
| length | 6.73 m |
| span | 17.71 m |
| Wing area | 27.41 m² |
| Wing loading | 14.66 kg / m² |
| Wing extension | 11.4 |
| Empty mass | 227 kg |
| Max. Takeoff mass | 409 kg |
See also
literature
- Martins Simons: Sling's Sailplanes. Part 4. In: Airplane Monthly. November 1992, ISSN 0143-7240 , pp. 38-41.
Web links
- Three-sided elevation of the Falcon 3 (accessed November 1, 2011)