Blackburn Type D

After the Mercury monoplanes of 1911, Robert Blackburn’s small Leeds works built a single-seater to the order of Cyril Foggin, a young Northumbrian who had just earned his aviator’s certificate on a Blériot. It kept the Mercury’s thin, constant-chord wing, warped for roll control and braced by wires from a kingpost above and from the chassis below, and its fuselage of triangular section, but it was shorter and simpler: the Gnome rotary sat under a cowl, the chassis had two wheels instead of four, the tailplane was less sharply swept and the fin carried a single rudder. Blackburn’s own records do not give it a type letter; the Shuttleworth Collection calls it the Type D.

Harold Blackburn, the firm’s pilot and no relation of its founder, first flew it late in 1912. In the spring of 1913 he gave exhibition flights at Lofthouse Park, between Leeds and Wakefield, flew to Harrogate and dropped leaflets over Stamford, and at the end of July he flew to York on three successive days carrying copies of the Yorkshire Post, some of the first newspapers delivered by air in Britain. Foggin flew it himself from March 1913, and later that year sold it to Montague Glew, who had learnt to fly at the Blackburn school.

Glew toured English towns with it, crashed it more than once and planned a race from Cardiff to Ilfracombe that the weather called off. A further crash in 1914 left it damaged beyond what he could repair before the war began, and the remains were put away on his family’s farm at Wittering. The design itself had already led on to the two-seat Type I of 1913 and to the Blackburn Aeroplane and Motor Company, formed in 1914, which grew into the maker of the Skua, the Beverley and the Buccaneer.