The weird Gonnel "Uniplan" of 1911

[Stargazer]

Caption for picture 1 (translated from Aero Journal):

This photo shows the strange contraption conceived by Arthur and Georges Gonnel, an "aerian" teted in March 1911 in Juvisy. The pilot Pappaert did not own an official flying license. He didn't manage to take off and that was the end of it... The "uniplan" had a 3.20 m wingspan, was 7 m long and and 3.33 m high. Wing area was 34 sq. m. It weighed approximately 300 kg when fully loaded. Built around an uncovered twin-boom fuselage directly connected to a kite-type wing by V-shaped tubes, and powered by a 28 hp 2-cylinder Velox-Suère engine, the aircraft was subsequently heavily modified: the photo represents it with a new fuselage and a 50 hp Velox-Suère engine with 4 staggered cylinders.

Additional info and pics from French Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer) via the Russian Their Flying Machines website:

This strange design by Arthur and Georges Gonnel was completed and tested by Pappaert at Juvisy in March 1911; it is unlikely to have flown. A square-sectioned uncovered fuselage sat on 2 wheels; the engine was set inside just over the wheels and drove a tractor propeller through a shaft. Above the fuselage, extending its whole length and about as wide, was a long covered boxlike frame, with fabric-covered extensions down each side, making rudimentary wings or fins. The underside of the box was left open, in which the air stream was to "induce a lifting reaction which ought to make it fly."
The machine was to be operated from roads: it was named Uniplan.

(Span: 3.2 m; length: 7 m; height: 3.33 m; wing area: 34 sqm; gross weight: c 300 kg; 30 hp Velox Suer)

 

[dan_inbox]

Les frères Raoul-Georges et Arthur-Édouard Gonnel, à Juvisy.


Nice photos, thank you Stéphane.

 

[VictorXL188]

Found a picture of a front view of this aircraft at http://chezpeps.free.fr/0/pre-1914/...aste_Breguet-Pre-1914-Aircraft-Challenge.html

 

[burunduk]

It seems there were two airplanes, or one was modified critically.

On the first Stargazer's photo there is four-longerons squared fuselage separated from the wing. On the second: three-longerons, attached to the bottom of the wing. The position of engine is quite different. On the last photo from Breguet's challenge there is four-wheel gears, on the others - two-wheel with tail forks. Can't anyone comment it, please?

 

[avion ancien]

Opdycke ('French Aeroplanes before the Great War') also says, by way of caption to the photographs of the Gonnel Uniplan, that:

If it was meant to run on roads, there seems no indication of steering, either of the main wheels or of the tailwheel.

 

[fortrena]

According to issues of the French daily L'Auto published between September 1911 and February 1912, an individual by the name of Pappaert took the aeroplane designed by Arthur-Édouard and Raoul-Georges Gonnel out of its hangar on several occasions. According to the January 31st, 1912 issue of that publication, Pappaert made many flights in late January. Those flights were presumably no more than uncontrolled hops.

Later on, Pappaert worked for (with?) a pilot named Émile Ladougne to put together a winged bicycle, or Aviette, imagined by Gabriel Frémont, a wealthy sport-loving jurist. A well known racing cyclist named Daniel Lavalade rode that machine in a May 1912 competition. He made a 1.1 or so metre hop. The Aviette was all but smashed in early June.

Interestingly, a 25 year old carpenter by the name of François Pappaert was sentenced to 6 months in jail in September 1912 for stealing tools which belonged to a gentleman named Gonnel.

 

[riggerrob]

This is the sort of foolishness that results when you try to apply 2D theory to 3D airflow. The low aspect-ratio configuration looks great on paper and even had a tolerable lift-to-drag ratio at shallow angles-of-attack, but at steep angles-of-attack it generates massive wing tip vortices that require huge amounts of thrust to over-come. No early airplane had significant amounts of thrust.

 

[klem]

Sometimes I like to do retrospectives just to see the qualitative leaps made by the pioneers of aviation at the cost of their lives by venturing into a new and unknown field. I find that at the same time not only the Gonnel which was mysterious it was the time of all the tests of the most unusual ideas such as the "Camille Delalandre -Irreversible- ". Camille developed in 1908, a similar plane with automatic lateral and longitudinal stability which resulted in 1912 in "I'rreversible", tested in June 1914 and crashed. With the beginning of the war his experiments ended.

 

[Aerohydro]

And this is how it looked like from the front. It was a small machine, with a wingspan of 2.35 m (7'8"), a chord of 7.25 m (23'8"), and a wing area of 16.00 sqm (172 sqft).

An article about l’avion “Irréversible" appeared in the "Aviation Magazine International" issue for 15 février 1974: page 62 and page 63

 

[Aerohydro]

Delalandre was not the only one intrigued by low AR aeroplanes. On the other side of the Atlantic, Alburt Shillcutt devised a remarkably similar design, though it doesn't seem to have progressed beyond model form, unfortunately.

There was, however, a patent - US1043473A

 

[publiusr]

They look like something that fell off an airship