AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 08 / 67

Plate 08 of 67 · Great War · Day bomber

Airco DH.9 / DH.9A

DH.9, painted as D5649, the Imperial War Museum’s Airco DH.9, a 1918 day bomber sent to India after the First World War as an Imperial Gift, found in 1999 in store at the Maharaja of Bikaner’s fort in Rajasthan and rebuilt by Retrotec as a static exhibit with a 230 hp Siddeley Puma: light grey plywood and metal panels over the forward fuselage and nose, khaki-brown PC10 dope on the rear fuselage, fin and upper surfaces over clear-doped linen undersides, a roundel under the pilot’s cockpit with black ‘W2 5649’ above it, a blue, white and red rudder with a black ‘D’ and ‘5649’, varnished spruce struts, the radiator lowered under the nose, a Vickers gun on the decking and a Lewis gun on the observer’s Scarff ring, as displayed at Duxford.

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as D5649, the Imperial War Museum’s Airco DH.9, a 1918 day bomber sent to India after the First World War as an Imperial Gift, found in 1999 in store at the Maharaja of Bikaner’s fort in Rajasthan and rebuilt by Retrotec as a static exhibit with a 230 hp Siddeley Puma: light grey plywood and metal panels over the forward fuselage and nose, khaki-brown PC10 dope on the rear fuselage, fin and upper surfaces over clear-doped linen undersides, a roundel under the pilot’s cockpit with black ‘W2 5649’ above it, a blue, white and red rudder with a black ‘D’ and ‘5649’, varnished spruce struts, the radiator lowered under the nose, a Vickers gun on the decking and a Lewis gun on the observer’s Scarff ring, as displayed at Duxford. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (840 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (); engine, crew and dimensions are for the DH.9 modelled here.

History

The DH.9

Geoffrey de Havilland designed the DH.9 at Airco in 1917 as the successor to his DH.4 day bomber, and a converted DH.4 flew as the prototype from Hendon in July 1917. It kept the DH.4’s wings and tail but had a new fuselage, with the pilot moved aft to sit just in front of the observer and his Scarff ring, so the two could talk, instead of being separated by the main fuel tank. It was to have the new 300 hp BHP engine, built as the Siddeley Puma, and after the Gotha raids on London that summer the government ordered it in vast numbers to give the new Royal Air Force a bombing force of its own.

The Puma ruined it. The engine never gave its promised power and was derated to 230 hp to keep its cylinder blocks in one piece, so the DH.9 was slower and climbed worse than the DH.4 it was meant to replace, and engine failures turned back many of its raids. No. 6 Squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service first took it into action in March 1918, and in the summer and autumn the day-bombing squadrons of the Independent Force flew it deep into Germany against fighters that could catch it easily; Nos. 99 and 104 Squadrons alone lost 54 shot down and 94 more wrecked in accidents. Production ran on regardless, and more than 4,000 were built.

Fitting the 400 hp American Liberty engine turned the design into the DH.9A, the ‘Ninak’, which became the RAF’s standard general-purpose aircraft and policed Iraq and the North-West Frontier until 1931. The Puma-engined DH.9 had a shorter but busy afterlife: in 1919 it bombed for the White armies in southern Russia, and in January and February 1920 a small force of them helped end the twenty-year rebellion of the Dervishes in British Somaliland. Hundreds went overseas as Imperial Gifts to the dominions and India, and South Africa’s, re-engined, flew on until 1937.

This airframe

DH.9 D5649

D5649The airframe modelled

D5649 is one of a handful of DH.9s known to survive. Built in 1918, it went to India after the war under the Imperial Gift scheme and ended up with at least two other DH.9s in store at the Maharaja of Bikaner’s fort in Rajasthan, where the restorer Guy Black found the remains in 1999 and shipped them to Britain in 2000. His company Retrotec rebuilt D5649 for the Imperial War Museum as a static exhibit, using the materials and methods of 1918, and it went on display at Duxford, Cambridgeshire, in 2007; its sister E8894 was restored to fly and is based there too. The model shows D5649 as displayed: light grey plywood and metal panels over the forward fuselage and nose, khaki-brown PC10 dope on the rear fuselage, fin and upper surfaces over clear-doped linen undersides, a blue, white and red roundel under the pilot’s cockpit with black “W2 5649” above it, a blue, white and red rudder with a black “D” and “5649”, roundels on the wings, varnished spruce struts, the radiator lowered under the nose, the bare Puma with its exhaust along the port side, a Vickers gun on the decking and a Lewis gun on the observer’s Scarff ring.

See it at IWM Duxford

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the DH.9 in 2 UK collections. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 67 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.