The first time I encountered a photograph of this oddity I knew someday I'd build a model of it. Now, decades later, my brother and I are designing from scratch our own 3D 'kit' of printed parts that we can assemble. The Wight A.1 Improved Navyplane, sometimes referred to as the 'Wight Pusher', was an enlargement of an earlier two-seater design by Howard Wright produced by White & Company. Being a double-cambered, swept-wing, five-bay, sesquiplane hydroplane of pusher configuration, there really was nothing quite else like it when it appeared at the Olympia Aero & Marine Exhibition in March 1914. With an ultimate wingspan of 71 feet it was likely the largest British plane ever manufactured to that date and possibly the world's largest seaplane. As White & Co. was in the shipbuilding trade, this beast actually rests on water-displacing hulls rather than conventional hydroplane floats. It featured the most powerful aero engine yet available in Britain: the 200hp Salmson 2M7 Canton-Unne twin-row, fourteen-cylinder radial. Flight magazine noted that, fully loaded including observer and wireless apparatus, the prototype could 'leave the water within five to seven seconds from opening out the motor'. It was also fitted with a double-cambered propeller, a bomb rack, armored seats, and an anchor! Popular Mechanics dubbed it 'the most useful of all seagoing aircraft'. The German
Kaiserliche Marine even ordered three, with one being delivered just weeks before the war. You can see from the photo below the Wight 'Improved Navyplane' also was one of the very first airplanes to be camouflaged.
Images:
Aeronautics, 27 June 1917 (left);
Country Life, 5 February 1916, p. 166 (right)
White & Co. designed a handful of aircraft types that saw service during the Great War, yet the only substantial writing on them,
The Wight Aircraft, by Mike Goodall, was published already fifty years ago. Only their quadruplane has ever been formally issued in kit form. I know of no other scratch-built model of the Improved Navyplane other than the manufacturer's 1/16th scale interpretation of the prototype from way back in 1914. Thankfully, the Goodall book contains a well-detailed three-view rendering of this particular craft, and a few period sketches can be found on the internet. Ultimately about a dozen flew in British service, mostly on coastal patrol, though a few were sent to the Dardanelles. We are focusing on these.
(images:
Flight, May 1914)
Over the past months I've been gathering information and slowly learning how to use Fusion 360, but my brother is doing all the real 3D design work. Modeling this bird is proving a challenge. There's no enclosed cockpit, so every detail is exposed, including the motor, which also has never before been modeled
en masse in scale form. Everything is tiny and fragile in 1/72 scale and guesswork will be involved. We also are experimenting with rendering the Navyplane in 'stripdown' form with the double-arched wing ribs, stiffening rods, and spars fully visible... and potentially coverable. More to follow but for now here are some of our early renderings from a few months back:
