Payen PA-22
experimental aircraft
The Payen PA-22 was a French experimental aircraft designed by Nicolas Roland Payen.
The aircraft had an unconventional design: it had a set of delta wings, in front of which were a set of short conventional wings. It had a fixed front landing gear and the cockpit was further back than usual.
Design and development
In 1935 the prolific aircraft designer Roland Payen developed a radical tandem-wing configuration aircraft which he dubbed the "Fléchair" (Arrow). The PA 22/1R was to be powered by an early form of ramjet known as the Melot 1R engine. This design was to participate in the 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe air race. Unfortunately the Melot engine was not able to develop the required thrust and the 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe was cancelled due to the start of World War II.
Payen redesigned the aircraft around a Regnier 180-horsepower (134 kW) 6B-01 six-cylinder, air-cooled inverted in-line engine, which was designated PA 22/2, and was completed in 1939. During its testing in the wind tunnel at Chalais-Meudon (Paris), the Germans invaded France and confiscated it. The German occupation forces were intrigued by the design and completed the wind tunnel testing. Redesignated the PA 22 V5, painted in German colors and coded BI+XB, the aircraft was transferred to Villacoublay.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Payen PA-22” is experimental aircraft. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Payen, PA-22 and experimental, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “experimental aircraft” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
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 Nov 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q183305. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1935 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Payen PA-22” 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.