|
Absolutely, Kees - this Aérophile plan is the same in every respect as the drawing supplied by Gabriel Voisin in his application for brevet FR386396 several months earlier, although Farman later wrote several times claiming it as his concept.
In Flight magazine in January 1909, he is quoted as saying that one of the three aeroplanes he then had under construction was “a revolutionary monoplane” which he already patented. Since no such patent exists (and the first Farman monoplane didn’t appear until 18 months later), he was still presumably referring to the Fish.
It feels like a Voisin design, though. Apart from the undercarriage, the fuselage is essentially the same as for the Goupy and de Bolotoff triplanes as well as the canards and the Voisin-engined tractor biplane later acquired by Jacquelin.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Charles Voisin was the only one of the three to pursue the (misguided) idea of stubby-winged multiplanes as being usable on the road as well as in the air.
And since we have expertise of matters German and Austrian in these pages, can anyone shed any light on what happened to Farman's first and most famous Voisin?
Its last recorded flight was in the hands of Legagneux on behalf of the Wiener Syndikat zur Veranstaltung von Schauflügen in May 23 1900, after which it was sent to the Militär-Aeronautische Anstalt for repairs; its final resting place was apparently the Vienna Army Museum, but there the trail goes cold. Hard to believe that having escaped destruction or recycling for long enough to become an exhibit, the archetype of the first series production aircraft in the world would have been thrown away. We shall never know, until someone one day recognises a beak-like elevator prow poking out of a box of sticks in a museum basement somewhere...
|