Nieuport 28 realy such a dog?

[Vic_Mouton]

Hi All

Was the bad mouthing received by the N28 justified? I get the feeling that it was a good plane saddled by rookie pilots that came up against the exellent DVII's flown by veterans. How did it compare to the DVa?

VBR
Vic

[Vigilant]

I've heard the French didn't think it was good enough for their own pilots though. Maybe it was OK but clearly the Spad was superior (if a little hard to compare directly).

Woof, woof

The Nie.28 did have some structural problems, leading to its infamous tendency to shed fabric from its upper wing. I think the main reason the French rejected it, though, is because they were by and large shifting to heavier, stationary-engined fighters. Nieuport got it right with the Nie.29, which married the 28's maneuverability with the stability and strength offered by the Hisso engine.

(Another problem for the Nie. 28 was that its big Gnome rotary sometimes set the machine on fire if the blip switch or selector magneto weren't used properly.)

[Barrett]

Earlier this year while helping bolt together the Champlin Museum's beautiful N.28, I learned a lot about its storied structural problems. The tendency to shed top wing fabric was not, apparently, strictly a fabric bonding problem. The designer(s) used essentially the same spar placement as in earlier designs, with too much unsupported rib overhang on the leading edge. Under certain aerodynamic loads, the ribs could fracture, inducing the fabric to rip loose. Evidently that's what happened to Rickenbacker, the most famous instance of N.28 wing failure. Anyway, the oft-cited "cause" of poor dope work or insufficient tacks don't seem to hold up.
Jim Appleby, the only N.28 pilot I know, really likes the airplane, though he says the controls are uncomfortably heavy without the fabric seal over the gap between aileron and wing.

One of the most beautiful aircraft ever built! Unfortunately, the N28 seems to have suffered from political problems. The French were committed to the SPAD and so thought it a good idea to dump the N28 on the Americans. Perhaps that's mercenary, at any rate the N28 was available for the Americans until SPAD production caught up. I read somewhere (I think in an old Cross & Cockade) that one American squadron commander liked the N28 a lot. So much so that he resisted getting SPAD's for his unit and got in enough trouble to be relieved of command. Does that sound familiar? Perhaps it was the 95th?

More than likely that the CO mentioned was Harold Hartney of 1 PG. He was mighty fond of the nimble Nieuports and cursed the SPADs that replaced them.

[PeterL]

Mike must have the handle on this one. Even rotary types were getting heavy around then, vis the Snipe and SSW DIII. The 28 is still the aeroplane I should most like to take to the ball though. Beautiful!

Peter L

Geoffrey Bonnell was the CO of the 147th. Hudson says that he and Hartney, trained with the RFC and used to rotary engines, wanted to retain the N.28. Bonnell put up such a fight that he was posted elsewhere.
There may have been something more to this. Ralph O'Neill seemed to think that Bonnell was a good CO who got steamrollered by the 94th "mafia"--that the 94th had the ear of HQ, supported HQ's questionable decision to adopt the Spad. Since the new German types were inline, German air strength was nearly all inline, and Bonnell thought that the rotaries could outfly them. The N.28 may not have been as rugged as the Camel, which served to the end of the war, but it was faster--nearly 20mph.
Bonnell knew rotaries: he started flying with 32 Sqn in DH 2's in 1916--he's in that group photo of 32, the tall man on the far left.