Well, big doin's at Toogahnein. Wayne Whitaker sold his interest in the Pietenpol to me and went out and bought a full-scale replica of a Sopwith Baby.
Uh whut?
A Sopwith Baby. Not a Sopwith Camel. Not a Sopwith Pup. Not even a Sopwith One-And-A-Half-Strutter.
Nope, a Sopwith Baby.
The Baby was a fairly rare World War I British biplane. Well, rare in that I had never heard of it. Actually, it has an illustrious history complicated by being manufactured by every pom who possessed a cord of wood, a tub of glue, a bolt of cotton, and a sincere desire to do the Crown out of few bob in the early stages of WWI (or so it seems). It's ancestry includes a float-equipped Sopwith Tabloid that won the Schneider Trophy in 1914.
The Tabloid was thus established as a hot ride, pretty much the F-22 of its day, and upon the commencement of hostilities, was ordered in some numbers by the Royal Air Corp (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), both of which you must admit, sound rather spiffier than the plain-jane "RAF".
It is not clear to me when the Tabloid morphed into the Baby, nor what constituted the differences in the former that led to the latter being considered an entirely new plane, but then, many things confuse me. Regardless, by 1915, Tabloids were so...1914, and instead Babies were all the rage.
Variants of the Baby were ordered by the RNAS for several roles, including pursuit, bombing, reconnaissance, and training. It was considered a sea-going "scout" plane, sort of a reconnaissance plane that shot at what it had reconnoitered after a flight over the ocean blue, I guess. Being a Naval service, the RNAS had several equipped with floats. Wayne's is not equipped with floats, though I am sure that the holes in the hangar roof are allowing it to get wet as it's pouring rain while I write this.
They were built by Sopwith (natch), Blackburn, Fairey (who dubbed it the "Fairy Hamble Baby" for reasons lost on your humble author), and, so help me, by Parnall, yet another British cabinet-maker-turned-aircraft-builders, who made yet another variant of the Fairey Hamble Baby. One wonders if Parnalls christened the resulting issue the "Parnall Sopwith Fairey Hamble Baby Perambulator." (Sadly, no. They named it the Hamble Baby Convert. What a missed opportunity.) It was even built under license by an Italian concern, SA Aeronautic Gio Ansaldo of Turin, and there was some Japanese interest mixed in there somewhere. Like I said, any johnnie with a bit of wood and some glue...
Wikipedia has an brief entry on the Sopwith Baby, where we're told that "Babys saw service with Canada, the United States, France, Chile, Greece and Norway. In Norway Babys were built occasionally as replacements, with a few seeing service until 1930." Zounds! The website of the Royal Australian Navy details its one example (and Wikipedia missed Oz as one of the countries that used the Baby). Another site of interest is sopwithbaby.com, which is all about a project to make a full-scale replica of the Baby, but NOT the replica Wayne bought. But, it's an interesting webpage with nice photos and detail.
One bit of information I cannot glean from these and other webpages is: which variant was the landplane, with wheels rather than floats for an undercarriage?
Back to Wayne's Baby. I am not 100% sure who built it, but it is somehow under the umbrella of Robert Baslee's Airdrome Aeroplanes. There's lots of discussion about this particular plane at the EAA Forums and at The Biplane Forum. You can read the stories there and see who built what for whom. Lots of nice pix there, too.
Regardless, Robert Baslee the man hissef delivered it yesterday morning at Oh-Dark-Thirty to Mark's hangar at Toogahnein. Robert and associate had to travel on to Maryland, so we were left with the pieces. No big deal. Within an hour it looked like this:
After breakfasting at a local watering hole, we got back on it and by a little after noon, it looked like this:
Some variants of the Baby could accommodate two people in a side-by-side seating for training. It has a HUGELY WIDE cockpit for a single-seater, but had to have been cramped for even two WWI teenaged pilots:
