Curtiss JN Jenny
trainer aircraft family by Curtiss
The Curtiss JN "Jenny" is a series of biplanes built by the Glenn Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York, later the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Although the Curtiss JN series was originally produced as a training aircraft for the US Army, the "Jenny" (the common nickname derived from "JN") continued after World War I as a civilian aircraft, becoming the "backbone of American postwar [civil] aviation". A version of the plane manufactured in Canada was known as the Curtiss Canuck.
Thousands of surplus Jennys were sold at bargain prices to private owners in the years after the war, and became central to the barnstorming era that helped awaken the United States to civil aviation through much of the 1920s.
Design and development
Curtiss began producing the JN or "Jenny" series of aircraft in 1915. While marketed to the US Army and US Navy as combining the best features of the model J and model N trainers, it was, in fact, a modified model J, with only the upper wing span adjusted. Curtiss built only a limited number of the JN-1 and JN-2 biplanes. The design was commissioned by Glenn Curtiss from Englishman Benjamin Douglas Thomas, formerly of the Sopwith Aviation Company.
The JN-2 was an equal-span biplane with ailerons controlled by a shoulder yoke in the aft cockpit. It was deficient in performance, particularly climbing, because of excessive weight.
The public source identifies “Curtiss JN Jenny” as trainer aircraft family by Curtiss. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Curtiss, Jenny and trainer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Curtiss JN Jenny” 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.