Humber Monoplane

Humber was one of the great names of the Coventry cycle and motor trade, and in 1909, the year Louis Blériot flew the Channel, its directors decided to add aeroplanes. The driving force was Ballin Hinde, a Humber director and vice-president of the Midland Aero Club. In September 1909 the company announced that it would build fifty Blériot ‘cross-channel’ monoplanes and sell them for £400 each. The Humber Monoplane followed the Blériot XI closely: a single-seat wire-braced monoplane with a wing warped for roll control, a fuselage covered round the cockpit and left as an open wooden girder behind it, a tailplane with elevators at its tips, a rudder on the tail post and a sprung chassis on two spoked wheels.

Where it differed was in the nose. In place of Blériot’s Anzani, Humber fitted a three-cylinder air-cooled fan engine of its own design, of about 30 hp, with a larger crankcase and dual ignition. Test flying began on the Riviera at Cannes in January 1910, and machines were shown at the Aero Show at Olympia that March, alongside the different Le Blon-type Humber monoplane. At Brooklands G. A. Barnes, who had joined Humber as a pilot, made the type’s first public flights in Britain, and on 21 June 1910 he gained Royal Aero Club aviator’s certificate No. 16 on a Humber Monoplane. A month later George Dawes earned No. 17 on another at Wolverhampton.

The fifty were never built. Humber’s aeroplanes were sound copies but no better than the French originals, and the company soon turned to biplanes of the Sommer type, two of which it sent to India early in 1911. Before long the aeroplane department was closed and Humber went back to the motor cars and motorcycles that paid its way. The venture was short, but it made Humber one of the first British companies to build aeroplanes in series, and it left Coventry with a taste for aircraft work that firms such as Armstrong Whitworth would take much further.