Evening All,
This was built as part of a GB on Britmodeller: there is also a build thread in scratchbuilds on this site. Construction was from plastic card, strip, rod and wood, and it was rigged with rolled 40SWG copper wire. The markings are from Arctic Decals and were commissioned by me - they are of excellent quality and highly recommended. The base is not finished: I am going to ask for help from members of my modelling club at the weekend to help me to get a better representation of the concrete platform which was at the base on the Adtraitic Sea from which some of these flying boats operated. This machine represents an aircraft in the spring of 1918.
The Hansa-Brandenburg was designed by Ernst Heinkel and his team for the German Navy but they showed no interest in it so it was offered instead to the Austro-Hungarian Navy KuK Kriegsmarine) who had issued a specification for a large general purpose flying boat powered by a 350 hp Austro-Daimler engine.
The navy ordered 60 machines in late 1916, the first of which was delivered in March 1917. Following the crash of the first example, delivery was delayed such that delivery of the the following 15 aircraft was not completed until March 1918. A shortage of engines meant that although most of the airframes were delivered in 1917-1918, many of the 134 manufactured were placed in storage and not used operationally.
The first W13 to see action was K366 in August 1917 and this machine was used on subsequent bombing operations until it was shot down in October 1917.
[
Other machines were used in the bombing and reconnaissance over the Adriatic Sea. Durazzo (an Italian port) was bombed successfully in June 1918, and later in the closing months of the war they were deployed against land targets in Bulgaria.
One machine (K405) was taken by the Americans as war reparation in 1919 and shipped to the USA where it was stripped down and rebuilt. It was thoroughly tested before being scrapped in 1922.
Thanks for looking.
Stephen.
