Sopwith Swallow Sopwith Swallow The Sopwith Swallow was a British parasol wing fighter aircraft of the First World War. A single example was built, but it saw no production, offering no performance advantages over contemporary biplanes. In June 1918, the Sopwith Aviation Company flew an unarmed parasol monoplane derivative of the Sopwith Camel, the Sopwith Monoplane No. 1, also known as the Sopwith Scooter. It used a normal Camel fuselage, with the wing mounted just above the fuselage, with a very small gap. The wing was braced using RAF-wire (streamlined bracing wires) to a pyramid shaped cabane above the wing. It was
Sopwith Pup takeoff experiments. In 1915, Sopwith produced a personal aircraft for the company's test pilot Harry Hawker, a single-seat, tractor biplane powered by a 50 hp Gnome rotary engine. This became known as Hawker's Runabout; another four similar aircraft have been tentatively identified as Sopwith Sparrows. Sopwith next developed a larger fighter that was heavily influenced by this design, though more powerful and controlled laterally with ailerons rather than by wing warping. The resulting aircraft was a single-bay, single-seat biplane with a fabric-covered wooden framework and staggered equal-span wings. The cross-axle type main landing gear was supported by V-struts attached to