Airco DH.9A
1918 bomber aircraft by Airco
The Airco DH.9A is a British single-engined light bomber that was designed and first used shortly before the end of the First World War. It was a development of the unsuccessful Airco DH.9 bomber, featuring a strengthened structure and, crucially, replacing the under-powered and unreliable inline 6-cylinder Siddeley Puma engine of the DH.9 with the American V-12 Liberty L-12 engine.
Colloquially known as the "Ninak" (from the phonetic alphabet treatment of designation "nine-A"), it served on in large numbers for the Royal Air Force following the end of the war, both at home and overseas, where it was used for colonial policing in the Middle East, finally being retired in 1931. Over 2,400 examples of an unlicensed version, the Polikarpov R-1, were built in the Soviet Union, the type serving as the standard Soviet light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft through the 1920s.
An American version, the USD-9A, was ordered from Curtiss though only nine were built. One served as a test-bed for experimental high-altitude flight.
Design and development
The DH.9A was planned as an improved version of the existing Airco DH.9. The DH.9 was a disappointment owing to its under-performing and unreliable engines, and the DH.9A was to use a more powerful engine to resolve this. As the Rolls-Royce Eagle engine used in the successful DH.4 was unavailable in sufficient quantities, the new American 400 hp (300 kW) Liberty engine was chosen instead.
As Airco was busy developing the Airco DH.10 Amiens twin-engined bomber, detailed design was carried out by Westland Aircraft.
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This entry incorporates text from “Airco DH.9A” 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.