Talk:Avro 500

Military Aircraft Trials

I am flabbergasted by the fact that this article has been sitting around on Wikipedia for so long containing such guff about being built to a War office Specification. As any fule kno, there was no such animal in 1911. The Wat office couls barely tell an aircraft from a hole in the ground, and Mervyn OGorman was furtively rebuilding aircraft better than they were before, at Farnborough. what is being talked about here is the Larkhill Trials. I'm sure the rest of the article needs a good going over. Hasta la vista, as they sayTheLongTone (talk) 07:32, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Ok, apologies, intemperate language. I see the phrae is used by Jackson, and I do of course knowthat the WO had formulated requireents, but I think to call it a specification is misleading. because it gives an impression of there being a coherent WO aircraft procurement system at the time. How times have changed.TheLongTone (talk) 14:21, 5 September 2011 (UTC)And as for first, there was a WO 'spec' of sorts issued in the summer of 1908, which, as I recall, required the aircraft to be able to survive a month in the open.TheLongTone (talk) 15:06, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Avro Duigan into article

In my opinion the Duigan is simply a variant of the 500. That this is not an eccentriv POV is backed by the fact that Peter Lewis includes the Duigan in the entry on the 500 in Britih Aircraft 1809-1914. (I don't have the Putnam book on Avro to hand, but I have read it closely recently, because I did some edits on both articles a short while back) The aircraft are virtually identical as far as principal details of the airframe: Lewis describes the the 500 as a slightly larger version of the Duigan with dual controls. There's no length figure in the wiki article on the Duigan or in Lewis, so whether the fuselage was identical I dont know: the span of the 500 is slightly more, but a couple of extra wing ribs don't make a new type. Both aircraft must have been on the drawing board at the same time, and it's dificult to imagine a whole set of drawings being prepared for a single aircraft. Not pre CAD.

Avro is one of the most important, if not the most important, British pioneer designers. As such, all his aircraft merit a thorough technical description, because there is a clear evolution. As it stands, both types have fair description, which pretty much duplicate eachother. Or should, apart from the odd strut or whatever, and of course the engines used. The only arguement for the Duigan havinga separate article is that it slightly precedes the 500: if not for this it would clearly be seen as a one-off variant.TheLongTone (talk) 14:57, 13 January 2012 (UTC)