Everything about Royal Aircraft Factory F E 8 totally explained
The
Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.8 was a
British single-seat
fighter of
the First World War designed at the
Royal Aircraft Factory.
Design and development
Like the
D.H.2, the
F.E.8 was designed as a
pusher in order to provide a forward firing machine gun mount at a time when no
synchronization gear was available to arm a
tractor aircraft in the same way. Although a clean and well designed little aeroplane, for a pusher – it couldn't escape the drag penalty imposed by its tail structure and was no match for the
Halberstadt and
Albatros fighters of late 1916.
The nacelle was, most unusually for the time, an all-metal structure – being framed in steel tube and covered with
duralumin. The prototypes were initially each fitted with a large pointed propeller spinner, while the Lewis gun was fitted on a movable mount within the nose of the nacelle. For production machines the spinner was omitted, and the gun was mounted directly in front of the pilot, in the manner of the D.H.2.
The new fighter wasn't a great improvement on the D.H.2 – although a little faster it didn't handle quite so well. It was nonetheless ordered into production from Darracq motors and Vickers. Neither manufacturer delivered their F.E.8s particularly quickly, so that it ended up reaching the front in numbers six months later than the D.H.2.
Operational history
Two F.E.8s were issued to
No. 29 squadron RFC, a D.H.2 unit, in June 1916, but it wasn't until August that
No. 40 squadron became fully operational on the type. The only other unit to fly the type,
No. 41 squadron, arrived in France in October.
After a fairly good start, the F.E.8 units quickly ran into problems with the new German fighters. On the 9th of March 1917 nine F.E.8 of No. 40 squadron had a dogfight with five
Albatros D.IIIs of
Jagdstaffel 11, led by
Manfred von Richthofen himself. Four F.E.8s were shot down, four others badly damaged, and the survivor caught fire when landing. After this disaster No. 40 squadron was re-equipped with
Nieuports and No. 41 restricted to
ground attack duties. No. 41 actually kept their pushers until July 1917 – becoming the last pusher fighter squadron in France.
Two F.E.8s were sent to Home Defence units in 1917, but the type wasn't adopted as a home defence fighter.
Reproductions
Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome's founder, Cole Palen, built the first flyable reproduction of an F.E.8, which is believed to have first flown in 1970 at Old Rhinebeck with a Le Rhône 80 hp rotary engine. It flew in the weekend air shows at Old Rhinebeck for a number of years, before being retired. It is currently in the collection of the
National Air and Space Museum.
The Owl's Head Transportation Museum in Maine has another F.E.8 reproduction in its collection, powered by a modern air-cooled, horizontally
opposed engine.
Operators
Specifications
Further Information
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