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Salmson 2

1918 WORLD WAR 1

The Salmson Story 2

The French Salmson Group was founded by Emile Salmson in 1890 and produced a large number of cars before the First World War. Just before the war, Salmson turned to making aircraft engines, which continued throughout the conflict into the 1940s. Before the company's collapse in 1946, Salmson undertook various design and production programs for military aircraft - including the "Salmson 2" series of biplanes that made their name during World War I.

The Salmson 2 was developed in response to the French Air Force's request for a reconnaissance platform to replace the outgoing Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter and Dorand A.R. series. To that end, Salmson designed a very traditional biplane layout with a roughly streamlined fuselage, forward-mounted engines, and two crew members sitting side by side in separate open-air cockpits. The wings have an equal span arrangement throughout, with parallel support struts and applicable wiring. The rear wing is conventional, with a vertical tail and associated horizontal tail. The landing gear is a fixed strut assembly attached to the underside of the fuselage and lower wing assembly, supporting a pair of landing gear.

At rest, a simple rear wing supports the aircraft's tail.

Since Salmson already has a long history of making aircraft engines, the Salmson 2 design uses an in-house Salmson 9Za series radial piston engine that produces 230 horsepower and drives a wooden two-bladed propeller assembly. This gives the finished airframe a top speed of 116 mph and a range of up to 300 miles.

The aircraft's service ceiling is listed as a useful 20,500 feet.

In keeping with other war development designs, the Salmson 2 is equipped with multiple machine guns that can be used offensively or defensively depending on the air situation. The pilot uses a .303 caliber Vickers machine gun that works with a breaker gear that controls the propeller. This arrangement allowed the machine gun to be fired through the rotating propeller blades without damaging the aircraft - a technique first perfected by the Germans during the war. The crew in the rear - observers in reconnaissance roles and gunners in defensive roles - wielded a pair of .303 caliber Lewis machine guns on trainable mounts.

Its primary role is to defend the critical rear quadrant of the aircraft, as this is where enemy aircraft are most likely to be pursued.

Development of the Salmson 2 took place in 1916, and the aircraft was officially ready for launch at the end of 1917. Production eventually stabilized, providing healthy, useful war figures, with a total of around 3,200 units completed. The Salmson 2 proved vital to French airborne operations in the last year of the war (1918), and its importance is illustrated in the production records.

Additionally, the incoming U.S. Army received 700 samples for its own reconnaissance purposes - further enhancing the genre's overall scope and importance to the Allied war effort against the Allies.

Salmson also offers a slightly modified Trainer variant of its Salmson 2, with redundant student and teacher controls. All in all, this plane is a viable mount with a strong feel and reasonable armament and performance.

Their design had several limitations common to other aircraft of the era - limited cockpit visibility, open-air communication between pilot and gunner, and canvas wood construction.

After the armistice in November 1918, the stockpile of Salmson aircraft was sufficient to sell to interested Allies in the postwar reconstruction world. As a result, global operators have sprung up in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Peru, Poland, Spain, the Soviet Union and Japan - with hundreds producing locally in Japanese factories.

The series also evolved into a handful of forgotten and eventually abandoned wartime variants, including the attack-oriented Salmson 4, the Salmson 5 tactical reconnaissance platform, and the Salmson 7 two-seat, single-cockpit reconnaissance platform. However, some wartime Salmson 2s were salvaged and converted into "Salmson Limousine" civilian passenger roles - air travel began to gain traction as a convenient form of transportation in the postwar world.