Goupil Duck

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The Goupil Duck was designed by Alexandre Goupil c. 1883 and built by the Curtiss Company in 1916.

Curtiss-Goupil Duck

Built based on the plans in Goupil's book but probably also resembling Patent FR-1883-158220. Intended to bear on the patent dispute between Curtiss and the Wrights.

Albert Francis Zahm described the "Duck" in 1944:

From the disclosures in Goupil's book the Curtiss Company, in 1916, built a Goupil-type monoplane to demonstrate the prior art. The writer saw the machine while building at Buffalo, and later during its preliminary flight tests at Hammondsport. [...]
[...] there is a tractor propeller; a bird-shaped body enclosing pilot, motor and controls; a pair of ailerons; a vertical rudder; an elevator; a landing carriage. The last, however, comprised a pair of elastically-mounted wheels, and a long tailskid, instead of the four long skates shown by Goupil. Celluloid windows gave outlook to the pilot.
The propeller was mounted on a long hollow shaft, or tube, elastically connected to a Curtiss OXX motor; the ailerons were supported at their roots on interconnecting axles, and at each wing tip by a wire-stayed strut jutting down from the wing; the elevator was hinged to the rear edge of the wing; the rudder was rigged below the elevator. A mast running up from the engine beds supported the landing wires.
The controls gave the same three-torque effect that Goupil describes, and had the same external appearance, though differing in constructive details, as do also many other control mechanisms using Goupil's principle. The rudder was connected to a regular foot-bar, and the elevator to a wheeled control column. Turning the wheel rotated the ailerons reversely, to exert a rolling movement; pitching the column rotated them identically, to exert a pitching movement jointly with the elevator. For example, during take-off the trailing edge of the ailerons was depressed, that of the elevator raised, and vice versa.
After some preliminary flight tests at Hammondsport, the monoplane was shipped to the Curtiss aerodrome at Newport News, and there flown in January, 1917. It made several satisfactory flights including a turn.
Having demonstrated the practicability of the Goupil three-torque airplane control, the Curtiss Company stored the monoplane in their Newport News hangar and made no subsequent use of it or of the flight test data. The present brief sketch is the first public account of the experiment, notwithstanding its very considerable historic interest.[1]

Links

References

  1. Zahm, 1944, pp. 333–335.