AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 10 / 215

Plate 10 of 215 · Pioneers · Experimental annular-wing biplane

Lee-Richards Annular Biplane

Annular Biplane (1911) replica, painted as BAPC.20, the full-size replica of the Lee-Richards Annular Biplane built in 1964 for the film ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’ and shown at Newark Air Museum: J. G. A. Kitchen’s experimental single-seat biplane of 1911, finished by Cedric Lee and G. Tilghman Richards, with two superimposed ring-shaped wings 20 ft across, each with a 10 ft hole in the middle, a wooden girder fuselage running through both rings, balancer panels hung from the outer struts, a tail of a flat tailplane over a zig-zag pair of fins, and a chassis of two skids each carried on a pair of spoked wheels, shown sitting slightly tail-down on its wheels and tail castors with no engine or propeller fitted, as displayed: off-white doped linen rings with the ribs and spars showing through, a varnished mahogany girder, hoops, struts and skids, white tail surfaces, a copper fuel tank, a green seat and black wheels, with no markings (no drawing of the biplane is known, so the shape was measured from photographs of the replica and the 1911 original, using the museum’s ring dimensions).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as BAPC.20, the full-size replica of the Lee-Richards Annular Biplane built in 1964 for the film ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’ and shown at Newark Air Museum: J. G. A. Kitchen’s experimental single-seat biplane of 1911, finished by Cedric Lee and G. Tilghman Richards, with two superimposed ring-shaped wings 20 ft across, each with a 10 ft hole in the middle, a wooden girder fuselage running through both rings, balancer panels hung from the outer struts, a tail of a flat tailplane over a zig-zag pair of fins, and a chassis of two skids each carried on a pair of spoked wheels, shown sitting slightly tail-down on its wheels and tail castors with no engine or propeller fitted, as displayed: off-white doped linen rings with the ribs and spars showing through, a varnished mahogany girder, hoops, struts and skids, white tail surfaces, a copper fuel tank, a green seat and black wheels, with no markings (no drawing of the biplane is known, so the shape was measured from photographs of the replica and the 1911 original, using the museum’s ring dimensions). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (626 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (replica); engine, crew and dimensions are for the Annular Biplane (1911) replica modelled here.

History

The Annular Biplane

In the first years of powered flight nobody knew what shape a wing ought to be, and several inventors patented wings bent into a complete circle, reasoning that a ring would be stable in every direction and have no tips to stall. One of them was John George Aulsebrook Kitchen, a Lancashire boiler engineer, who built a biplane with two superimposed ring-shaped wings, each about 20 ft across with a hole 10 ft wide in the middle, joined by a wooden girder fuselage that ran straight through both holes. Kitchen could not get it to fly, and he sold the machine and his patent to Cedric Lee, who went on to buy up a rival circular-wing patent as well.

In 1910 Lee was joined by G. Tilghman Richards, and together they finished the biplane as a single-seat tractor with a 50 hp Gnome Omega rotary in the nose, the pilot sitting in the open girder between the rings. It was tested in 1911 on the sands at Middleton, near Heysham, with disappointing results, and it is not known to have made a proper flight. That autumn a gale brought down its hangar and the biplane was destroyed on the ground.

Lee and Richards were not discouraged. Model tests at the National Physical Laboratory suggested that a single ring wing would be stable and stall gently, and in 1913 and 1914 they built three annular monoplanes, flown at Shoreham by Gordon England, Gordon Bell and others, which were found to be stable and pleasant to fly. The war ended the work. Lee was killed on naval service, and Richards went on to the Science Museum in London, which keeps a model of the monoplane.

This airframe

Lee-Richards Annular Biplane replica BAPC.20

BAPC.20The airframe modelled

Nothing of the 1911 biplane survives. BAPC.20 is a non-flying full-size replica, built in 1964 by Denton Partners of Reading for the film ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’. It was saved from Booker in 1967, came to Newark Air Museum in 1975, and was restored between 2000 and 2006 by the Shoreham Airport Historical Association; it now stands in the museum’s first display hangar. The model shows it as photographed there in recent years, sitting a little tail-down on its wheels and tail castors, with no engine or propeller fitted: two rings of off-white doped linen with the ribs and spars showing through, a varnished mahogany girder, hoops, struts and skids, white tail surfaces with a zig-zag pair of fins, off-white balancer panels hung from the outer struts, a copper fuel tank, a green seat and black spoked wheels, with no markings on the airframe. No drawing of the biplane is known, so the shape was measured from photographs of the replica and of the 1911 original, using the museum’s figures of 20 ft for the rings and 10 ft for the holes.

See it at Newark Air Museum

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Annular Biplane in one UK collection. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 215 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.