Caudron C.270 Luciole
1930s French light aircraft
The Caudron C.270 Luciole ("Firefly") was a sporting, touring and trainer aircraft produced in France in the 1930s, derived from the C.230.
Design and construction
It was a conventional biplane with single-bay, unstaggered wings of equal span. The pilot and a single passenger sat in tandem open cockpits. It featured a fabric-covered fuselage in place of the C.230's wooden one, and other refinements including revised control surfaces and undercarriage, and an improved and simplified wing-folding mechanism.
Operational history
The type proved immensely successful, with over 700 machines built in the decade leading up to World War II. Of these, 296 were purchased by the French government for its pilot training programme, the Aviation Populaire. Many examples saw wartime service as liaison aircraft, and those surviving the conflict saw postwar use as glider tugs in the Ecole de l'Air.
On film
20th Century Fox used two Lucioles in their 1966 film The Blue Max. These had the rear seat converted into a machine-gun position so that they look like British observation planes. One of these survives on the American registry.
United Artists used one Luciole for their film Von Richthofen and Brown (released in 1971).
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This entry incorporates text from “Caudron C.270 Luciole” 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.