Blériot III

__NOTOC__ Infobox Aircraft
name=III


caption=Bleriot III in original floatplane configuration
type=Experimental aircraft
manufacturer=Louis Blériot and Gabriel Voisin
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produced=1906
number built=1
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right|thumb|The Bleriot IV depicted in a fanciful contemporary postcard. The aircraft was not capable of anything like this.

The Blériot III was an early French aeroplane built by pioneer aviators Louis Blériot and Gabriel Voisin, and eventually became their first design to actually leave the ground under its own power. The Blériot III was a design radically different from what would later become orthodox for aircraft, featuring two large elliptical annular wings joined by a boom. A single Antoinette engine drove two tractor propellers and it was provided with float undercarriage. Blériot and Voisin made repeated attempts to fly it from Lake Enghein between May and September 1906, but the machine would not become airborne.

In October they made major changes to the design, replacing the forward annular wing with a conventional biplane cellule, adding a second engine, and changing the propellers from tractors to pushers. At this point, it was renamed Blériot IV. Even with these modifications however, the aircraft still refused to leave the ground, so on 12 November, they removed the floats and added a wheeled undercarriage to try again on land. Matching power between the two engines proved to be a major problem, but they nevertheless coaxed the machine into making a series of short hops before one of its wingtips struck a gutter, damaging it beyond repair. Modern sources differ as to whether to dignify these hops as "flight", but the failure of the aircraft to achieve anything greater drove Voisin to terminate his partnership with Blériot and pursue his own designs alone.

pecifications (IV)

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crew=one pilot
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span m=10.50
span ft=34
span in=5
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wing area sqm=73
wing area sqft=785
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gross weight kg=480
gross weight lb=1,060

eng1 number=2
eng1 type=Antoinette V-8
eng1 kw= 18
eng1 hp= 24
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References

*
* Devaux, Jean and Michel Marani. "Les Douze Premiers Aéroplanes de Louis Blériot". "Pegase" No 54, May 1989.
* [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bleriot/imag-nf.html Nova: A Daring Flight]
* [http://www.earlyaviators.com/ebleriot1.htm earlyaviators.com]

ee also

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