From the ceiling in a room filled with rotary engines and airplane models at the Landskrona town museum hangs a small biplane of 1918 vintage. The room displays a small exhibition dedicated to Enoch Thulin and his Thulin works (AETA) - a short-lived aviation company which went bust after Great war surplus flooded the marked and the demand fell. Despite its relatively short lifespan, Thulin laid the foundation of Swedish aviation industry, produced a dozen or so types, some license-built, some own designs. The preserved plane in the ceiling is the Thulin NA, the last of the lot.
Only one prototype was built. First flight in April 1919, made a respectable 215 km/h powdered by its 9-cylinder Thulin G rotary. A bare month later, Thulin crashed fatally during a practice flight with an older design. With the market saturated and Thulin dead, the company was gone within a year. The NA ended up in the Landskrona museum as one of a few preserved Thulin aircraft.
Also preserved, in the Stockholm technological museum, is the single prototype of type N, from which the NA was derived. The planes were likely built towards an expected procurement of scouts for the Swedish army aviation that never materialized. The N first flew in 1917, just prior to the government competition that was eventually cancelled. No one seems to know why the type was further developed into the NA the following year.
The N had a rather sleek, rounded fuselage of plywood on wooden frames, while the NA had a lighter and stronger metal skeleton but a less sleek appearance with a rectangular linen-covered aft fuselage. That and improvements of the 9-cylinder Thulin G engine (itself a development of the Le Rhone rotary) gave the NA a top speed of 210+ km/h compared to some 160 km/h of the N. Another difference was that the NA had ailerons on both wings. Of some inexplicable reason the NA was made into a two-seater with a ridiculously cramped observer’s seat.
Apart from engines and wheels from the spares box the models were put together from mostly styrene sheet and strip. Struts from pressed styrene rod or metal, while large round shapes were plunge moulded.
Thulin N and NA, ledt and right respectively:
The N had a fuselage covered with varnished plywood…
…while linen covered the NA, maybe to save weight or hours:
The empennage were otherwise very similar:
