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De Havilland Hawk Moth

British four-seat cabin monoplane

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ3703990 ↗
Source-derived summary

The de Havilland DH.75 Hawk Moth was a 1920s British four-seat cabin monoplane built by de Havilland at Stag Lane Aerodrome, Edgware, in London.

Design and development

The DH.75 Hawk Moth was the first of a family of high-wing monoplane Moths, and was designed as a light transport or air-taxi for export. The aircraft had a fabric-covered steel-tube fuselage and wooden wings. The Hawk Moth was first flown on 7 December 1928 from Stag Lane. The first aircraft used a 200 hp (149 kW) de Havilland Ghost engine. This engine comprised two de Havilland Gipsys mounted on a common crankcase to form an air-cooled V-8. With the Ghost, the aircraft was underpowered and a 310 hp (230 kW) Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah 7-cylinder radial engine was fitted to it and all but one production aircraft. Changes were also made to the structure including increased span and chord wings and the aircraft was redesignated the DH.75A.

In December 1929 the first aircraft was demonstrated in Canada with both wheel and ski undercarriage. Following trials with the second aircraft on floats, the Canadian government ordered three aircraft for civil use. The first Canadian aircraft (actually the first Hawk Moth) did not have doors on the port side and could therefore not be used as a floatplane, so it was used by the Controller of Civil Aircraft.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “De Havilland Hawk Moth” as british four-seat cabin monoplane. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Havilland, Hawk and Moth.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1928, 1929—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Havilland, Hawk and Moth providing the first useful test.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “De Havilland Hawk Moth”, the useful work is to connect “british four-seat cabin monoplane” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

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 Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3703990. The Library of Congress control number is sh2009007868. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928 and 1929.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “De Havilland Hawk Moth” 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.