Why a triplane?

On Sat, 2 Feb 2008 00:57:21 +0000 (UTC), Bertie the Bunyip wrote:

Ricky wrote in news:5f96da3b-7f80-4b6f-aac7-
:

The Sopwiht had some reasonable level of succes. Sopwith went for it
mostly to improve visibviliy, believe it or not.

Ironic... knew a guy locally who had a Fokker DR-1 replica. His biggest
complaint was how BLIND the plane was. Then again, Sopwith used some fairly
narrow-chord wings, and had the pilot sitting back from them.

In fact, there are no aerodynamic avantages. None at all. The center
plane is almost completely useless. There's a lot of interplane
interference with a biplane, though this can be put to some advantage
with decalage and stagger. Basically, the one plane influences the
other. With a tripe, the top and bottom planes affect the center, which
can't be practically spaced from it's neighbors givng it very little
lift and effectively neutralising it.

One would have thought the Fokker D-6 (essentially a biplane DR-1) would have
quickly superseded it, then. But I suppose Fokker finally getting the Mercedes
engine let him jump to the bigger D-7.

There were actually very few DR1s built. A few hundred IIRC.It would
have been forgotten but that Richtofen died in one.

Ah, but Werner Voss was first, and established the reputation of the type. He
lasted as long as he did, in his last dogfight, because of the maneuverability
of the Tripe. OTOH, he might have lived if he'd been flying something that
COULD have run away from the SE-5s....

All sides tried
them. The Neiuport tripe showed an interesting approach to getting
around the interplane interference problems by a multiple stagger
approach ( look one up, it;s hard to descibe)

http://wwi-cookup.com/dicta_ira/nieuport/triplane01.jpg

Ron Wanttaja