AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 04 / 205

Plate 04 of 205 · Pioneers · Single-seat monoplane

Blériot XI

Type XI (Anzani), painted as G-AANG, The Shuttleworth Collection’s Blériot XI, built in France in 1909–10 and the oldest aeroplane in the world still flying: the type in which Louis Blériot crossed the Channel on 25 July 1909, a single-seat wire-braced monoplane with a 25 hp Anzani three-cylinder fan engine driving a two-bladed tractor propeller, a deeply cambered wing warped for roll control, a fuselage covered round the cockpit and an open wooden girder behind, a tailplane with all-moving tip elevators, a rounded rudder on the tail post, and a sprung chassis of two spoked wheels with a small tail wheel, shown standing tail-down on its wheels: cream doped linen with the rib tapes showing, honey-brown varnished wooden girder and chassis frame, a mahogany propeller, black steel cabane, pylon and tail struts, bright steel chassis tubes with cream bungee cord, an aluminium crankcase with black finned cylinders and a brass fuel tank, with no markings on the airframe, as it is flown from Old Warden (the geometry follows published three-views; the rudder is enlarged from photographs of G-AANG).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as G-AANG, The Shuttleworth Collection’s Blériot XI, built in France in 1909–10 and the oldest aeroplane in the world still flying: the type in which Louis Blériot crossed the Channel on 25 July 1909, a single-seat wire-braced monoplane with a 25 hp Anzani three-cylinder fan engine driving a two-bladed tractor propeller, a deeply cambered wing warped for roll control, a fuselage covered round the cockpit and an open wooden girder behind, a tailplane with all-moving tip elevators, a rounded rudder on the tail post, and a sprung chassis of two spoked wheels with a small tail wheel, shown standing tail-down on its wheels: cream doped linen with the rib tapes showing, honey-brown varnished wooden girder and chassis frame, a mahogany propeller, black steel cabane, pylon and tail struts, bright steel chassis tubes with cream bungee cord, an aluminium crankcase with black finned cylinders and a brass fuel tank, with no markings on the airframe, as it is flown from Old Warden (the geometry follows published three-views; the rudder is enlarged from photographs of G-AANG). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (406 KB)

Data plate

Specification

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

History

The Blériot XI

Louis Blériot made his fortune selling acetylene headlamps for motor cars and spent much of it on aeroplanes that crashed. Between 1900 and 1908 he tried flapping wings, box-kite biplanes, a canard and a tandem-wing machine, and by the end of that run he had settled on the tractor monoplane: engine and propeller at the front, wing ahead of the pilot and tail behind. The Type XI, drawn with the help of the engineer Raymond Saulnier, was shown at the Paris aero show in December 1908 and first flew at Issy-les-Moulineaux on 23 January 1909. It was a small machine of wood, wire and linen: a box-girder fuselage covered only round the cockpit, a deeply cambered wing that was warped to roll the aircraft, a tailplane with tips that moved as elevators, and a sprung chassis with two bicycle-style wheels.

The first engine gave trouble, and in May 1909 Blériot fitted a three-cylinder Anzani of about 25 hp, built by Alessandro Anzani, an Italian maker of motorcycle engines in Paris. The Daily Mail had offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel, and on 19 July Blériot’s rival Hubert Latham came down in the sea in his Antoinette. Before dawn on 25 July, with a foot still bandaged from an earlier burn, Blériot took off from Les Baraques near Calais without a compass, lost sight of both coasts in haze and landed heavily in a meadow beside Dover Castle about 37 minutes later, damaging the chassis and propeller. He was the first person to fly an aeroplane across the sea between two countries, and Britain was no longer simply an island.

Orders followed at once, and the Type XI was built in large numbers in France and under licence abroad, with more powerful Gnome rotaries, two-seat cockpits and longer wings. Blériot opened flying schools, including one at Hendon, and a great many of the first generation of pilots in Britain and France learned on the type. Armies bought it too. On 23 October 1911, in the war between Italy and Turkey in Libya, Captain Carlo Piazza flew a Blériot XI on what is often counted the first reconnaissance flight of a war, and in August 1914 Blériots went to France with the Royal Flying Corps and served with the French and other air services until faster aircraft replaced them.

This airframe

Blériot XI G-AANG

G-AANGThe airframe modelled

G-AANG, also recorded as BAPC.3, is a Type XI with a 25 hp Anzani built in 1909–10, like the Channel machine, and is generally held to be the oldest aeroplane in the world still able to fly. Damaged early in its life, it was rebuilt by A.E. Grimmer of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and in 1935 Richard Shuttleworth bought it, the first of the historic aeroplanes that became the Shuttleworth Collection. It still flies at Old Warden, making short straight hops along the grass on calm summer evenings, and it was re-covered there in 2008–09. The model shows it as photographed at Old Warden, standing tail-down on its wheels: cream doped linen with the ribs showing through, a honey-brown varnished wooden girder and chassis frame, a mahogany propeller, black steel cabane, pylon and tail struts, bright steel chassis tubes with cream bungee cord, an aluminium crankcase with black finned cylinders and a brass fuel tank, and no markings on the airframe. The shape follows published three-view drawings of the Anzani-engined Type XI, but the rudder is drawn larger, as photographs of G-AANG show it. The span and length are the Collection’s figures for G-AANG; the height is taken from the drawing.

See it at The Shuttleworth Collection

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Blériot XI in 3 UK collections. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 205 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.