Westland Wagtail Westland Wagtail The Westland Wagtail was a prototype British fighter aircraft of the First World War. A single-engined tractor biplane, the Wagtail was a failure owing to the unreliability of its engine, only five being built. The Westland Wagtail was designed by Westland Aircraft of Yeovil in 1917 to meet the Royal Air Force Specification IA for a light fighter with superior performance to the Sopwith Camel. Westland's design team, led by Robert Bruce, the Company's manager and Arthur Davenport, Chief Draughtsman, came up with a design for a small single bay biplane, powered (like the other competitors for the
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