Bristol F.3A
1910s British fighter aircraft design
The Bristol F.3A was a British three-seat, single-engined biplane designed by the British & Colonial Aeroplane Co in 1916 as an anti-Zeppelin fighter. Two prototypes were ordered for the Royal Flying Corps but were not completed and the project was cancelled. In 1923 the type was retrospectively designated the Type 7.
Development
The company was invited to bid for the production of two prototype escort and anti-Zeppelin fighters, using two 250 hp Rolls-Royce engines made available by the Admiralty. The design was based on the company's twin-engined local defence fighter, the T.T.A., and was required to have a patrol endurance of seven hours. The company received an order on 16 May 1916 to build two prototypes for the Royal Flying Corps. The type used many TTA components including the wings, rear fuselage and tail unit. The two gunners were each accommodated in a nacelle on the top wing with a forward- and rearward-firing machine gun.
With the availability of aircraft with synchronising guns the programme was cancelled and the two aircraft were not built.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4968897. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1916 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bristol F.3A” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.