Thanks for responding, but I do share your doubt about the reliability of the caption. I have seen pictures of the prototype that could be interpreted to be blue and silver, but all the pictures I’ve seen of the DH 53s at Lympne show translucent flying surfaces that I think must have been clear doped. Also, it seems pretty clear that the fuselage had two colors, not one.

Maybe there is no record of how they were painted. Too bad there isn’t some nice doggerel like the one about the Gloster Gannett…

Engine feeling very blue,
Fuselage same color too.

Jim

Have you got a reference for the Edward B Doepke article? I don’t know why he would say “a decade after the Wrights’ first flight, wing warping was gone and the hinged aileron had taken its place.” At the end of 1913 the Deperdussin had just won the Gordon Bennett Trophy at 124 mph and the Sopwith Schneider still had it’s famous race ahead of it. Not to mention the early WWI wing warpers still being produced well into 1915. But allowing some wiggle room for the word “decade” I suppose he’s about right.

I’m sure it’s true that eventually speed and maneuverability at higher speeds required stiffer wings and wing warping was finished. It would be interesting if any early designers left notes on their decisions to switch to ailerons and what difference it made in a plane like the Sopwith Tabloid, which was produced and flown extensively both ways.

Yes, I have heard that with new materials there is some experimental interest in wing warping, or “wing morphing” as they say, which might be a little different.

Jim

Interesting comments. I have not seen any good, documented analysis of the subject. Bleriots started having wing failures when power increased, but by strengthening spars and increasing the number of bracing wires the problem was solved while retaining the wing warping, and eventually Pegoud and others were able to perform aerobatics with them.

I think it is true that early ailerons caused a lot of drag. That was certainly true of the separate ailerons like Curtiss used, as Frank Tallman tells us in his book. Maybe that’s why wing-warpers dominated early racing. Many early designers thought it was best to put the most aileron area at the wing tips where it was supposed to have the greatest effect on roll. They didn’t know about wing tip vortices. They were creating the greatest deflection precisely where it would cause the greatest drag and adverse yaw. You see this on Nieuport and Albatross designs, for example. The worst was the early Antoinettes, with ailerons hanging off the trailing edges. No wonder Levavasseur switched to wing warping. Actually several early designers switched from some type of aileron to wing warping. Some people say that early ailerons on light wing structures caused a trim tab effect and twisted the wing the opposite way, causing reversal.

I wonder what the effect was when, for example, Sopwith switched from wing warping to ailerons on the Tabloid. Did it make the Tabloid a better airplane? Had they stiffened the wing structure so that it didn’t warp easily anymore? I’ve always assumed that as speeds increased and combat required sudden control movements that structures had to be stiffened, and then ailerons were the only solution. But then, the Deperdussin was doing 124 mph and used wing warping.

What seems clear is that wing-warping was fully competitive with ailerons in the early days. Just how that changed is something that is easy to speculate about, but not so easy to find documented evidence about.

Jim