Central Centaur IV
type of aircraft
The Central Centaur IV, a.k.a. Central C.F.5, was a British civil two/three-seat biplane aircraft produced by Central Aircraft Company Limited of London.
History
The Centaur IV was a two-seat wire-braced, fabric-covered wooden biplane designed by A.A. Fletcher. It was the first original design to be built by Central Aircraft Company at Kilburn, London during 1919. The prototype had a 70 hp (52 kW) Renault air-cooled V-8 engine but the seven production aircraft were fitted with an Anzani radial engine.
The Centaur IV was originally proposed in two versions:
A two-seat aircraft, with the two seats side-by-side in an open cockpit;
A three-seat aircraft, with two seats side-by-side and the open cockpit extended to allow installation of a third (single) seat.
No market existed for private ownership at that time, so the eight aircraft were all built as three-seaters. All the aircraft were initially used by Central Aircraft for joyriding or instruction at Northolt Aerodrome. The fifth aircraft was fitted with a three-float undercarriage. It was used for a week giving joyrides at Southend-on-Sea.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 26, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5060535. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Central Centaur IV” 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.