Nieuport 14
1915 reconnaissance aircraft by Nieuport
The Nieuport 14 (or Nieuport XIV A.2 in contemporary sources) was a military reconnaissance sesquiplane produced in France during the First World War. The French Army deployed it in 1916 but the type was quickly withdrawn from front-line service.
Development
Developed in response to an order by the Aéronautique Militaire in the summer of 1915 for a two-seat reconnaissance machine capable of making a flight of 180 km (110 mi) and back while carrying a load of bombs. Nieuport started with the Nieuport 12 reconnaissance aircraft, but stretched its fuselage to balance the single nose-mounted Hispano-Suiza V-8 engine and its wingspan was increased by the addition of an additional bay. Protracted development that saw some refinement in the engine installation and the wing area increased from 28 m2 (300 sq ft) square meters to 30 m2 (320 sq ft) resulted in it entering service only in mid 1916.
Further development, with a larger engine and a further enlarged and airframe would result in the Nieuport 15.
Three additional unrelated airframes that some sources have connected to the Nieuport 14 were built, all featuring a nose radiator, single bay wings and a deep hunchback fuselage. One had large wing cut-outs to improve visibility and was fitted with a 180 hp (130 kW) Lorraine-Dietrich 8A engine, another with a 150 hp (110 kW) Hispano-Suiza engine, and a third with a 220 hp (160 kW) Hispano-Suiza engine and a crescent-shaped wing.
With its failure as a combat aircraft, a dedicated trainer variant was developed, the Nieuport 14 École with dual controls, nosewheels to guard against nose-over accidents, and an 80 hp (60 kW) Le Rhone 9C rotary engine in the place of the original V-8. It is possible that some of these airframes had been left over from the original production.
The public source identifies “Nieuport 14” as 1915 reconnaissance aircraft by Nieuport. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nieuport, reconnaissance and aircraft.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nieuport 14” 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.