Top speed 208 km/h Length 6.79 m | Wingspan 13 m Manufacturer Dux Factory | |
The Farman F.30 was a two-seat military biplane designed in France around 1915, which became a principal aircraft of the Imperial Russian Air Service during the First World War. Although it was widely used on the Eastern Front, and by the factions and governments that emerged in the subsequent Russian Civil War, it is not well-known outside that context: the F.30 was never adopted by other Allied air forces, and the manufacturers reused the "Farman 30" designation for an entirely different aircraft in 1917.
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Design and development
The F.30 was one of the final variants of the "Farman type", a distinctive aircraft layout developed by the Anglo-French brothers Henry and Maurice Farman. These were biplanes of a pusher configuration, with the propellor at the rear of the engine, behind the wings. The crew of two (pilot and observer) sat in front in an open cockpit, the wings were of a simple unstaggered) design, while the rear part of the plane was just a wire-braced framework supporting the tail.
The basic airframe of the F.30 was very similar to the earlier and slightly smaller F.20, a two-bay biplane with a shorter lower wing (a primitive sesquiplane layout), a reasonably long v-shaped tail framework, and similar control surfaces - ailerons on the outer sections of the upper wings, and a single rudder and a high tailplane at the rear. It differed by reviving the raised fuselage position of the 1913 MF.11, positioning the cockpit and engine half-way between the wings rather than mounting them directly on top of the lower wing, and it was the first Farman to adopt the simple and robust v-strut undercarriage that was becoming standard. Perhaps most importantly, it improved on the underpowered F.20 by utilizing the much more potent 150 hp Salmson 9 radial engine.
Available sources generally record a top speed of 136 km/h, although a later version with uprated 160 hp engine known as the F.30 bis raised performance to 140 km/h; one source states a speed of 155 km/h, associated with a lighter version of the airframe. In comparative tests in 1916, the version with the 150 hp engine proved to have superior performance to the Voisin 5 light bomber and Lebed XI scout, the other designs available for large-scale Russian production; the prototype Anatra DS was apparently faster, but that plane did not enter production until 1917. One reference suggests that the F.30 could more-or-less match the manoeuvrability of the opposing Fokker Eindecker, albeit perhaps at the very limit of its own flight envelope.
It is not clear how much the final design of the F.30 represented a straightforward product of the Farman design bureau, and how much it incorporated modifications by the Russians. The plane's length is given variously as both 8.65 m and 10.66 m, suggesting significant variation between individual machines.
In addition to these reasonably straightforward variants, the seaplane-skiplane hybrid known as the ShCh M-16 Zimnyak is also identified as a heavily modified subtype of the F.30. Designed by D.P. Grigorovich, this retained only the 150 hp Salmson and the basic layout of the F.30, with a modified cockpit, shorter tail and staggered wings of equal length, plus a specialized undercarriage.
Operational history
At the start of the First World War the Farman type pusher biplane was widely regarded as the best available design for a combat aircraft: the unencumbered position of the cockpit provided a very wide field of fire for a forward-facing gun, not to mention a good view ahead and to the sides for piloting, aerial reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The greater lift of a biplane design enabled the plane to carry a heavier cargo, such as a payload of bombs under the wings. The relatively simple airframe was also seen as suitable for mass production. Especially before synchronization gears became widely available, these criteria were though to outweigh the superior speed and flight performance offered by monoplane designs with a front-mounted propellor.
Other contemporary Allied warplanes, such as the French Breguet Bre.5 and the British F.E.2, DH.1 and D.H.2, used the Farman pusher layout. The scant available figures suggest that performance was also similar, although late-production F.E.2 and the D.H.2 were apparently faster than a typical F.30.
Unusually the F.30 was used exclusively by the Imperial Russian Air Service, and serial production appears to have taken place principally or entirely in Russia. The Air Service was already using Farman type aircraft extensively, and had substantial experience of manufacturing them under license. At an early stage, there had been talk of making the MF.11 the Air Service's primary plane, and in 1913 a HF.15 had been their first armed fighter. Details on how and when the F.30 was procured seem sketchy, with vaguely-indicated dates for its front-line deployment ranging from late 1915 to late 1916. The new type was known as the Farman Tridtsat' (Фарман тридцать, "Farman Thirty", often written Фарман-XXX) and was nicknamed the "Fartri", or sometimes the "Farsal" (Фарсаль) from its Salomon engine.
The F.30 appears to have been produced principally by the Dux Factory in Moscow, although some level of construction seems to have also taken place at several of the other major Russian aircraft factories. With over 400 planes built at Dux alone, it far outnumbered the Lebed and Anatra designs or the limited numbers of fighters assembled from imported components, although the situation is less clear with the Voisin V. Alongside the F.30, limited numbers of both the F.27 and the F.40 bomber were also procured.
In spite of its apparent ubiquity, there is little detailed information available about the combat role of the F.30. As an Imperial military doctrine for the use of aircraft developed in 1914, armed Farman type biplanes (and a few Sikorsky S-12s) were designated for important fortress garrisons and each numbered army's headquarters, with unarmed monoplanes serving as high-speed scouts for front-line army corps, but by the outbreak of hostilities, this distinction seems to have been abandoned: for example, the squadron attached to 1 Corps flew the F.22, an immediate precursor of the F.30.
There are sketchy references to the type's involvement in air combat, but it is not clear how far the F.30 had been deployed before two consecutive developments in 1916 that curtailed its usefulness. Firstly, the Air Service began to restrict the air superiority role to new high-performance planes equipped with synchronization gears, like the imported Nieuport 11; then, the F.30 was definitively outclassed in combat by new opponents, beginning with the Albatros D.I fighter and the Albatros C.V scout. Increasingly, the F.30's "pusher" engine came to be regarded as a large, exposed target for attackers from the rear.
Nonetheless, a large production run and relatively good performance ensured that the F.30 saw wide use. It flew in a battlefield reconnaissance role, including photo reconnaissance, and probably on bombing raids in early Soviet squadrons in 1918. At least some individual planes were still assigned to fighter units, presumably to provide them with a reconnaissance and liaison capability: in late 1917, the 19th Fighter Squadron used a single F.30 alongside its five up-to-date Nieuports. A measure of its relative capability can be gauged from the fact that the F.30 was the only warplane design with a large-scale production line which was not mentioned when the First All-Russia Aviation Congress demanded an end to the manufacture of obsolescent planes in August 1917. The type was used by both sides in the Russian Civil War, and continued in production under the Red government. The Berdyansk factory was still producing planes in 1919.
There were 147 F.30s in the Soviet inventory in 1921, still in the front-line reconnaissance role; shortly afterwards, it was decided to reassign them to a training role, but in 1922, there were still five front-line squadrons with 63 planes, and just eight trainers; by 1924, there remained at least nine trainers and eight planes in front-line service. Subsequently, at least ten were transferred to the new civil aviation organization, where they were apparently used to for "propaganda and recruitment" across the Soviet Union: some continued to fly until the end of the 1920s.
The wide availability of the type also meant that it was acquired by other emerging states of Eastern Europe, In late 1917, a report for the nascent Ukrainian People's Army Air Force reported an inventory of 22 aircraft in the territory controlled by the Central Rada, while two more examples were serving with the ex-Imperial units that became the founding squadrons of the Polish Air Force, and a further seven were captured by them subsequently. In 1918 an L.30 became one of the first two planes of the nascent Czech Air Force, with at least one more acquired soon after while six of the M-16 snowplane/seaplane variant were acquired by the Finnish Air Force and served until 1923. In 1919, a captured example became the first plane of the Estonian Air Force.
Operators
Specifications
There are some minor inconsistencies in the F.30's specifications in published sources; the following figures seem to be approximately correct for typical Dux Factory aircraft. The maximum speed has been given as 136 km/h (approx. 73 knots, 85 mph)
Data from Avia France
General characteristics
Performance
Armament