Nieuport B.N.1
prototype fighter biplane, failed bid to replace the Sopwith Camel
The Nieuport B.N.1 was a prototype British single-engined fighter aircraft of the First World War. It was a single-engined biplane intended to replace the Sopwith Camel, but only one was built, being destroyed in a crash. The Sopwith Snipe was built instead to replace the Camel.
Development and design
In 1917, as a result of an official Inquiry (the Burbidge Report) into the activities of the Royal Aircraft Factory, design and construction of aircraft at Farnborough ceased, and the Factory's design teams were broken up. This allowed the Nieuport & General Aircraft Co Ltd, which was formed at Cricklewood, London in 1916 to license produce French Nieuport aircraft, to acquire the services of Henry Folland, previously responsible for the design of the S.E.5 fighter, as chief designer. His first design for Nieuport & General was another fighter, intended to meet Air Board Specification A.1.A for a replacement for the Sopwith Camel, in competition with designs submitted by Sopwith (the Sopwith Snipe), Austin Motors (the Austin Osprey) and Boulton & Paul (the Bobolink).
This aircraft, designated Nieuport B.N.1 (for "British Nieuport"), was a single-engined, single seat tractor biplane of wooden construction. It had equal-span, unstaggered two bay wings, a slab-sided fuselage and was powered by a 230 hp (172 kW) Bentley BR2 rotary engine. A distinctive feature was a ventral fin, as used on the S.E.5 (which was to become a distinguishing mark of many of Folland's designs). Armament was the normal pair of synchronised Vickers machine guns together with a Lewis gun mounted on the upper wing, firing over the propeller.
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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 Feb 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16999012. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nieuport B.N.1” 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.